Abstract
Many social animals cooperatively process information during decision making, allowing them to concentrate on the best of several options. However, positive feedback created by information sharing can also lock the group into a suboptimal outcome if option quality changes over time. This creates a trade-off between consensus and flexibility, whose resolution depends on the information-sharing mechanisms groups employ. We investigated the influence of communication behavior on decision flexibility in nest site choice by colonies of the ant Temnothorax rugatulus. These ants divide their emigration into two distinct phases separated by a quorum rule. In the first phase, scouts recruit nestmates to promising sites using the slow method of tandem running. Once a site's population surpasses a quorum, they switch to the faster method of social transport. We gave colonies a choice between two sites of different quality, and then switched site quality at different points during the emigration. Before the quorum was met, colonies were able to switch their choice to the newly superior site, but once they began to transport, their flexibility dropped significantly. Close observation of single ants revealed that transporters were more likely than tandem leaders to continue recruiting to a site even after its quality was diminished. That is, tandem leaders continued to monitor the quality of the site, while transporters instead fully committed to the site without further assessment. We discuss how this change in commitment with quorum attainment may enhance the rapid achievement of consensus needed for nest site selection, but at a cost in flexibility once the quorum is met.
References
Beckers R, Deneubourg JL, Goss S, Pasteels JM (1990) Collective decision making through food recruitment. Insectes Soc 37:258–267. doi:10.1007/BF02224053
Beckers R, Deneubourg JL, Goss S (1992) Trail laying behaviour during food recruitment in the ant Lasius niger (L.). Insectes Soc 39:59–72. doi:10.1007/BF01240531
Bhatkar A, Whitcomb WH (1970) Artificial diet for rearing various species of ants. Fla Entomol 53:229–232
Briscoe AD, Chittka L (2001) The evolution of color vision in insects. Ann Rev Entomol 46:471–510. doi:10.1146/annurev.ento.46.1.471
Chittka L, Skorupski P, Raine N (2009) Speed–accuracy tradeoffs in animal decision making. Trends Ecol Evol 24:400–407
Conradt L, Roper T (2005) Consensus decision making in animals. Trends Ecol Evol 20:449–456
Cronin AL (2013) Synergy between pheromone trails and quorum thresholds underlies consensus decisions in the ant Myrmecina nipponica. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 67:1643–1651. doi:10.1007/s00265-013-1575-9
Cronin AL, Stumpe MC (2014) Ants work harder during consensus decision-making in small groups. J R Soc Interface 11:20140641–20140641. doi:10.1098/rsif.2014.0641
Detrain C, Deneubourg J-L (2008) Collective decision-making and foraging patterns in ants and honeybees. Adv Insect Physiol 35:123–173
Donaldson-Matasci MC, DeGrandi-Hoffman G (2013) Bigger is better: honeybee colonies as distributed information-gathering systems. Anim Behav 85:585–592
Doran C, Pearce T, Connor A et al (2013) Economic investment by ant colonies in searches for better homes. Biol Lett 9:20130685–20130685. doi:10.1098/rstb.2002.1061
Dussutour A, Nicolis SC (2013) Flexibility in collective decision-making by ant colonies: tracking food across space and time. Chaos 50:32–38
Dyer J, Ioannou C, Morrell L, Croft D (2008) Consensus decision making in human crowds. Anim Behav 75:461–470
Franks N, Pratt S, Mallon E et al (2002) Information flow, opinion polling and collective intelligence in house-hunting social insects. Philos T Roy Soc B 357:1567–1583. doi:10.1098/rstb.2002.1066
Franks N, Dornhaus A, Fitzsimmons J, Stevens M (2003a) Speed versus accuracy in collective decision making. Proc R Soc B 270:2457–2463. doi:10.1098/rspb.2003.2527
Franks NR, Mallon EB, Bray EH et al (2003b) Strategies for choosing between alternatives with different attributes: exemplified by house-hunting ants. Anim Behav 65:213–223
Franks NR, Hooper JW, Gumn M et al (2007) Moving targets: collective decisions and flexible choices in house-hunting ants. Swarm Intell 1:81–94
Franks NR, Hardcastle KA, Collins S et al (2008) Can ant colonies choose a far-and-away better nest over an in-the-way poor one? Anim Behav 76:323–334. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.02.009
Giraldeau LA, Valone TJ, Templeton JJ (2002) Potential disadvantages of using socially acquired information. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 357:1559–1566. doi:10.1098/rstb.2002.1065
Granovskiy B, Latty T, Duncan M et al (2012) How dancing honey bees keep track of changes: the role of inspector bees. Behav Ecol 23:588–596
Grüter C, Leadbeater E (2014) Insights from insects about adaptive social information use. Trends Ecol Evol 29:177–184. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2014.01.004
Grüter C, Leadbeater E, Ratnieks FLW (2010) Social learning: The importance of copying others. Curr Biol 20:R683–R685. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.06.052
Jeanson R, Dussutour A, Fourcassié V (2012) Key factors for the emergence of collective decision in invertebrates. Front Neurosci 6:1–15
Krause J, Ruxton G (2002) Living in groups. University Press, Oxford
Latty T, Beekman M (2013) Keeping track of changes: the performance of ant colonies in dynamic environments. Anim Behav 85:637–643. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.12.027
Marshall J, Dornhaus A, Franks N, Kovacs T (2006) Noise, cost and speed-accuracy trade-offs: decision-making in a decentralized system. J R Soc Interface 3:243–254. doi:10.1098/rsif.2005.0075
Möglich M, Maschwitz U, Hölldobler B (1974) Tandem calling: A new kind of signal in ant communication. Science 186:1046–1047. doi:10.1126/science.186.4168.1046
Pirrone A, Stafford T, Marshall JAR (2014) When natural selection should optimize speed-accuracy trade-offs. Front Neurosci 8:73. doi:10.3389/fnins.2014.00073
Pratt S (2005a) Quorum sensing by encounter rates in the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Behav Ecol 16:488–496
Pratt S (2005b) Behavioral mechanisms of collective nest-site choice by the ant Temnothorax curvispinosus. Insectes Soc 52:383–392. doi:10.1007/s00040-005-0823-z
Pratt SC, Sumpter DJT (2006) A tunable algorithm for collective decision-making. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 103:15906–15910
Pratt SC, Mallon E, Sumpter D, Franks N (2002) Quorum sensing, recruitment, and collective decision-making during colony emigration by the ant Leptothorax albipennis. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 52:117–127
Richardson T, Sleeman P, McNamara J (2007) Teaching with evaluation in ants. Curr Biol 1520–1526
Rogers EM (2003) Diffusion of innovations, 5th edn. Free Press, New York
Sasaki T, Pratt SC (2013) Ants learn to rely on more informative attributes during decision-making. Biol Lett 9:20130667–20130667. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2013.0667
Sasaki T, Granovskiy B, Mann RP et al (2013) Ant colonies outperform individuals when a sensory discrimination task is difficult but not when it is easy. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110:13769–13773. doi:10.1073/pnas.1304917110
Schaerf TM, Makinson JC, Myerscough MR, Beekman M (2013) Do small swarms have an advantage when house hunting? The effect of swarm size on nest-site selection by Apis mellifera. J R Soc Interface 10:20130533–20130533. doi:10.1098/rsif.2013.0533
Seeley T, Camazine S, Sneyd J (1991) Collective decision-making in honey bees: how colonies choose among nectar sources. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 28:277–290
Sendova-Franks AB, Franks N (1993) Task allocation in ant colonies within variable environments (a study of temporal polyethism: experimental). B Math Biol 55:75–96. doi:10.1016/S0092-8240(05)80062-X
Shaffer Z, Sasaki T, Pratt SC (2013) Linear recruitment leads to allocation and flexibility in collective foraging by ants. Anim Behav 86:967–975. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.08.014
Sumpter DJT (2010) Collective animal behavior. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Sumpter DJT, Beekman M (2003) From nonlinearity to optimality: pheromone trail foraging by ants. Anim Behav 273–280
Sumpter DJT, Pratt SC (2009) Quorum responses and consensus decision making. Philos T Roy Soc B 364:743–753. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0204
Sumpter D, Krause J, James R, Couzin I (2008) Consensus decision making by fish. Curr Biol 18:1773–1777
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant 1012029) and the School of Life Sciences Undergraduate Research (SOLUR) program at Arizona State University.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Communicated by D. Naug
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sasaki, T., Colling, B., Sonnenschein, A. et al. Flexibility of collective decision making during house hunting in Temnothorax ants. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 69, 707–714 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-015-1882-4
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-015-1882-4