Infrastructure construction without information exchange : the trail clearing mechanism in Atta leafcutter ants

Bochynek, Thomas; Burd, Martin; Kleineidam, Christoph; Meyer, Bernd

Infrastructure construction without information exchange : the trail clearing mechanism in Atta leafcutter ants

Dateien

Bochynek_2-1jikvev79q9fv2.pdfGröße: 1.07 MBDownloads: 257

Datum

2019

Autor:innen

Bochynek, Thomas

Burd, Martin

Kleineidam, Christoph

Meyer, Bernd

Open Access-Veröffentlichung

Open Access Gold

Sammlungen

Biologie
Exzellenzcluster "Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour"

Publikationstyp

Zeitschriftenartikel

Publikationsstatus

Published

Erschienen in

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 2019, 286(1895), 20182539. ISSN 0962-8452. eISSN 1471-2954. Available under: doi: 10.1098/rspb.2018.2539

Zusammenfassung

A wide range of group-living animals construct tangible infrastructure networks, often of remarkable size and complexity. In ant colonies, infrastructure construction may require tens of thousands of work hours distributed among many thousand individuals. What are the individual behaviours involved in the construction and what level of complexity in inter-individual interaction is required to organize this effort? We investigate this question in one of the most sophisticated trail builders in the animal world: the leafcutter ants, which remove leaf litter, cut through overhangs and shift soil to level the path of trail networks that may cumulatively extend for kilometres. Based on obstruction experiments in the field and the laboratory, we identify and quantify different individual trail clearing behaviours. Via a computational model, we further investigate the presence of recruitment, which—through direct or indirect information transfer between individuals—is one of the main organizing mechanisms of many collective behaviours in ants. We show that large-scale transport networks can emerge purely from the stochastic process of workers encountering obstructions and subsequently engaging in removal behaviour with a fixed probability. In addition to such incidental removal, we describe a dedicated clearing behaviour in which workers remove additional obstructions independent of chance encounters. We show that to explain the dynamics observed in the experiments, no information exchange (e.g. via recruitment) is required, and propose that large-scale infrastructure construction of this type can be achieved without coordination between individuals.

Fachgebiet (DDC)

570 Biowissenschaften, Biologie

Schlagwörter

collective construction, Atta, trail clearing, foraging infrastructure, leafcutter ants, cleared trails

Zitieren

ISO 690

BOCHYNEK, Thomas, Martin BURD, Christoph KLEINEIDAM, Bernd MEYER, 2019. Infrastructure construction without information exchange : the trail clearing mechanism in Atta leafcutter ants. In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 2019, 286(1895), 20182539. ISSN 0962-8452. eISSN 1471-2954. Available under: doi: 10.1098/rspb.2018.2539

BibTex

@article{Bochynek2019-01-30Infra-45004,
  year={2019},
  doi={10.1098/rspb.2018.2539},
  title={Infrastructure construction without information exchange : the trail clearing mechanism in Atta leafcutter ants},
  number={1895},
  volume={286},
  issn={0962-8452},
  journal={Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences},
  author={Bochynek, Thomas and Burd, Martin and Kleineidam, Christoph and Meyer, Bernd},
  note={Article Number: 20182539}
}

RDF

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Universitätsbibliographie

Ja

Begutachtet

Ja