TY - JOUR
T1 - Individual and collective decision-making during nest site selection by the ant Leptothorax albipennis
AU - Mallon, E. B.
AU - Pratt, S. C.
AU - Franks, N. R.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements We thank Guy Blanchard, Kenro Kusumi, Tom Seeley and David Sumpter for helpful discussions and comments on the manuscript. E.B.M. was funded by a natural science demonstratorship from the University of Bath. S.C.P. was funded by a long-term fellowship from the Human Frontiers Science Program. The experiments reported here comply with the current laws of the United Kingdom.
PY - 2001
Y1 - 2001
N2 - Social insect colonies possess remarkable abilities to select the best among several courses of action. In populous societies with highly efficient recruitment behaviour, decision-making is distributed across many individuals, each acting on limited local information with appropriate decision rules. To investigate the degree to which small societies with less efficient recruitment can also employ distributed decision-making, we studied nest site selection in Leptothorax albipennis. Colonies were found to make sophisticated choices, taking into account not only the intrinsic qualities of each site, but also its value relative to the available options. In choices between two sites, individual ants were able to visit both sites, compare them and choose the better one. However, most ants encountered only one site in the course of an emigration. These poorly informed ants also contributed to the colony's decision, because their probability of initiating recruitment to a site depended on its quality. This led to shorter latencies between discovery and recruitment to a superior site, and so created greater amplification via positive feedback of the population at the better site. In short, these small colonies make use of a distributed mechanism of information processing, but also take advantage of direct decision-making by well-informed individuals. The latter feature may in part stem from the limitations of their social structure, but may also reflect the stringent demand for unanimous decisions by house-hunting colonies of any size.
AB - Social insect colonies possess remarkable abilities to select the best among several courses of action. In populous societies with highly efficient recruitment behaviour, decision-making is distributed across many individuals, each acting on limited local information with appropriate decision rules. To investigate the degree to which small societies with less efficient recruitment can also employ distributed decision-making, we studied nest site selection in Leptothorax albipennis. Colonies were found to make sophisticated choices, taking into account not only the intrinsic qualities of each site, but also its value relative to the available options. In choices between two sites, individual ants were able to visit both sites, compare them and choose the better one. However, most ants encountered only one site in the course of an emigration. These poorly informed ants also contributed to the colony's decision, because their probability of initiating recruitment to a site depended on its quality. This led to shorter latencies between discovery and recruitment to a superior site, and so created greater amplification via positive feedback of the population at the better site. In short, these small colonies make use of a distributed mechanism of information processing, but also take advantage of direct decision-making by well-informed individuals. The latter feature may in part stem from the limitations of their social structure, but may also reflect the stringent demand for unanimous decisions by house-hunting colonies of any size.
KW - Ants
KW - Communication
KW - Decentralised control
KW - Decision-making
KW - Social insects
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0034828414&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=0034828414&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s002650100377
DO - 10.1007/s002650100377
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0034828414
SN - 0340-5443
VL - 50
SP - 352
EP - 359
JO - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
JF - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
IS - 4
ER -