Speed–cohesion trade-offs in collective decision making in ants and the concept of precision in animal behaviour

Franks, Nigel R.; Richardson, Thomas O.; Stroeymeyt, Nathalie; Kirby, R.W.; Amos, Wally; Hogan, Patrick M.; Marshall, James A. R.; Schlegel, Thomas

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.03.010

Cited by 38 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…only around 5% of the colony act as scouts during house-hunting in honeybees and Temnothorax ants [28,29]). There may thus be considerable scope for adaptive variation in the proportion of the group that contributes to the decision process [30]. Furthermore, in addition to the question of how many individuals contribute to the consensus process, there is the question of who contributes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ants work harder during consensus decision-making in small groups

Cronin

Stumpe²

2014

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Individuals derive many benefits from being social, one of which is improved accuracy of decision-making, the so-called 'wisdom of the crowds' effect. This advantage arises because larger groups can pool information from more individuals. At present, limited empirical data indicate that larger groups outperform smaller ones during consensus decision-making in human and non-human animals. Inaccurate decisions can lead to significant costs, and we might therefore expect individuals in small groups to employ mechanisms to compensate for the lack of numbers. Small groups may be able to maintain decision accuracy if individuals are better informed than those in larger groups and/or by increasing the proportion of the group involved in collective decision-making relative to larger groups. In this study, we use interactive computer vision software to investigate individual contributions to consensus decision-making during house-hunting in different sized groups of the ant Myrmecina nipponica. We show that individuals in small colonies invest greater effort in the consensus decision process than those in large colonies and should be better informed as a result. This may act to ameliorate the limitations of group size, but could leave smaller groups more susceptible to additional stresses.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ants work harder during consensus decision-making in small groups

Cronin

Stumpe²

2014

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…The system with negative feedback, instead, displays a constant convergence time regardless of the initial state of the system (see Supplementary Material). Figure 3 shows how the convergence speed and the deviation from the target distribution are influenced by the strength of the negative feedback; the strength of negative feedback can tune a speed-robustness trade-off, similarly to the tuning of speed-value and speed-coherence trade-offs in consensus decisions [20,21,24].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance

Reina

Marshall

2020

Preprint

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Social insect colonies use negative as well as positive feedback signals to regulate foraging behaviour. In ants and bees individual foragers have been observed to use negative pheromones or mechano-auditory signals to indicate that forage sources are not ideal, for example being unrewarded, crowded, or dangerous. Here we propose an alternative function for negative feedback signals during foraging, variance reduction. We show that while on average populations will converge to desired distributions over forage patches both with and without negative feedback signals, in small populations negative feedback reduces variation around the target distribution compared to the use of positive feedback alone. Our results are independent of the nature of the target distribution, providing it can be achieved by foragers collecting only local information. Since robustness is a key aim for biological systems, and deviation from target foraging distributions may be costly, we argue that this could be a further important and hitherto overlooked reason that negative feedback signals are used by foraging social insects.

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“…Even when confronted with a choice between four identical sites, colonies whose low-quality home nest was left intact are able to reach almost complete consensus within a few hours and move the large majority of the colony (mean ± standard error: 89.7 ± 3.7%) to a single new nest. This shows that symmetry-breaking deliberation occurs during exploration48. It is therefore likely that in natural conditions, deliberation mechanisms usually allow informed workers to reach complete or almost complete consensus over a single site before emigration is necessary.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Information Certainty Determines Social and Private Information Use in Ants

Stroeymeyt

Giurfa

Franks

2017

Sci Rep

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Decision-making in uncertain environments requires animals to evaluate, contrast and integrate various information sources to choose appropriate actions. In consensus-making groups, quorum responses are commonly used to combine private and social information, leading to both robust and flexible decisions. Here we show that in house-hunting ant colonies, individuals fine-tune the parameters of their quorum responses depending on their private knowledge: informed ants evaluating a familiar new nest rely relatively more on social than private information when the certainty of their private information is low, and vice versa. This indicates that the ants follow a highly sophisticated ‘copy-when-uncertain’ social learning strategy similar to that observed in a few vertebrate species. Using simulations, we further show that this strategy improves colony performance during emigrations and confers well-informed individuals more weight in the decision process, thus representing a novel mechanism for the emergence of leadership in collective decision-making.

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Speed–cohesion trade-offs in collective decision making in ants and the concept of precision in animal behaviour

Cited by 38 publications

References 63 publications

Ants work harder during consensus decision-making in small groups

Ants work harder during consensus decision-making in small groups

Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance

Information Certainty Determines Social and Private Information Use in Ants

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