Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance.

Area of Science:

• Behavioral Ecology
• Collective Intelligence
• Insect Social Behavior

Background:

• Social insects like ants and bees utilize both positive and negative feedback mechanisms to regulate foraging.
• Negative feedback signals, such as pheromones or acoustic cues, inform foragers about suboptimal conditions (e.g., unrewarded, crowded, or dangerous sites).

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate an additional function of negative feedback signals in social insect foraging: variance reduction.
• To determine if negative feedback improves the precision of population distribution across forage patches compared to positive feedback alone.

Main Methods:

• Agent-based modeling simulating foraging behavior in social insect colonies.
• Analysis of population distribution convergence and variance under different feedback scenarios (positive only vs. positive and negative).
• Exploration of results' independence from the specific nature of the target distribution.

Main Results:

• Populations converge to desired forage distributions with or without negative feedback on average.
• Negative feedback significantly reduces variation around the target distribution in small populations compared to positive feedback alone.
• The observed variance reduction is independent of the target distribution, provided it's achievable via local information.

Conclusions:

• Negative feedback signals in social insect foraging serve a crucial role in variance reduction, enhancing robustness.
• This overlooked function of negative feedback may be a key evolutionary driver for its use in foraging social insects.
• Reduced deviation from optimal foraging distributions is critical for colony survival and efficiency.