A locally-blazed ant trail achieves efficient collective navigation despite limited information
- Department of Physics of complex systems, Israel
- Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
- Institut de Recherche en Informatique Fondamentale, CNRS and University Paris Diderot, France
- Institut de Recherche en Informatique Fondamentale, INRIA and University Paris Diderot, France
Abstract
Any organism faces sensory and cognitive limitations which may result in maladaptive decisions. Such limitations are prominent in the context of groups where the relevant information at the individual level may not coincide with collective requirements. Here, we study the navigational decisions exhibited by Paratrechina longicornis ants as they cooperatively transport a large food item. These decisions hinge on the perception of individuals which often fails to supply the group with reliable directional information. We find that, to achieve efficient navigation despite partial and even misleading information, these ants employ a locally-blazed trail. This trail significantly deviates from the classical notion of an ant trail: First, instead of systematically marking the full path, ants mark short segments originating at the load. Second, the carrying team constantly loses the guiding trail. We experimentally and theoretically show that the locally-blazed trail optimally and robustly exploits useful knowledge while avoiding the pitfalls of misleading information.
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Author details
Funding
European Research Council (DBA-648032)
- Amos Korman
- Ofer Feinerman
Israel Science Foundation (833/15)
- Ofer Feinerman
Narodowe Centrum Nauki (2015/17/B/ST6/01897)
- Adrian Kosowski
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2016, Fonio et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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A locally-blazed ant trail achieves efficient collective navigation despite limited information
eLife 5:e20185.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20185
