Knowledgeable individuals lead collective decisions in ants.

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_77475E933160
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Title
Knowledgeable individuals lead collective decisions in ants.
Journal
Journal of Experimental Biology
Author(s)
Stroeymeyt N., Franks N.R., Giurfa M.
ISSN
1477-9145 (Electronic)
ISSN-L
0022-0949
Publication state
Published
Issued date
2011
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
214
Number
Pt 18
Pages
3046-3054
Language
english
Abstract
Self-organisation underlies many collective processes in large animal groups, where coordinated patterns and activities emerge at the group level from local interactions among its members. Although the importance of key individuals acting as effective leaders has recently been recognised in certain collective processes, it is widely believed that self-organised decisions are evenly shared among all or a subset of individuals acting as decision-makers, unless there are significant conflicts of interests among group members. Here, we show that certain individuals are disproportionately influential in self-organised decisions in a system where all individuals share the same interests: nest site selection by the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Workers that visited a good available nest site prior to emigration (the familiar nest) memorised its location, and later used this memory to navigate efficiently and find that nest faster than through random exploration. Additionally, these workers relied on their private information to expedite individual decisions about the familiar nest. This conferred a bias in favour of familiar nests over novel nests during emigrations. Informed workers were shown to have a significantly greater share in both recruitment and transport to the familiar nest than naïve workers. This suggests that they were the main determinants of the collective preference for familiar nests, and thus contributed greatly to enhance collective performance. Overall, these results indicate that self-organised decisions are not always evenly shared among decision-makers, even in systems where there are no conflicts of interest. Animal groups may instead benefit from well-informed, knowledgeable individuals acting as leaders in decisions.
Keywords
Animal Migration/physiology, Animals, Ants/physiology, Cooperative Behavior, Decision Making/physiology, Knowledge, Memory/physiology, Nesting Behavior/physiology, Orientation/physiology, Running/physiology, Time Factors
Pubmed
Web of science
Open Access
Yes
Create date
15/11/2011 14:53
Last modification date
20/08/2019 14:34
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