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Emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule
Ant colonies regulate foraging in response to their collective hunger, yet the mechanism behind this distributed regulation remains unclear. Previously, by imaging food flow within ant colonies we showed that the frequency of foraging events declines linearly with colony satiation (Greenwald et al.,...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10110237/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37067884 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.77659 |
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author | Baltiansky, Lior Frankel, Guy Feinerman, Ofer |
author_facet | Baltiansky, Lior Frankel, Guy Feinerman, Ofer |
author_sort | Baltiansky, Lior |
collection | PubMed |
description | Ant colonies regulate foraging in response to their collective hunger, yet the mechanism behind this distributed regulation remains unclear. Previously, by imaging food flow within ant colonies we showed that the frequency of foraging events declines linearly with colony satiation (Greenwald et al., 2018). Our analysis implied that as a forager distributes food in the nest, two factors affect her decision to exit for another foraging trip: her current food load and its rate of change. Sensing these variables can be attributed to the forager’s individual cognitive ability. Here, new analyses of the foragers’ trajectories within the nest imply a different way to achieve the observed regulation. Instead of an explicit decision to exit, foragers merely tend toward the depth of the nest when their food load is high and toward the nest exit when it is low. Thus, the colony shapes the forager’s trajectory by controlling her unloading rate, while she senses only her current food load. Using an agent-based model and mathematical analysis, we show that this simple mechanism robustly yields emergent regulation of foraging frequency. These findings demonstrate how the embedding of individuals in physical space can reduce their cognitive demands without compromising their computational role in the group. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10110237 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-101102372023-04-18 Emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule Baltiansky, Lior Frankel, Guy Feinerman, Ofer eLife Computational and Systems Biology Ant colonies regulate foraging in response to their collective hunger, yet the mechanism behind this distributed regulation remains unclear. Previously, by imaging food flow within ant colonies we showed that the frequency of foraging events declines linearly with colony satiation (Greenwald et al., 2018). Our analysis implied that as a forager distributes food in the nest, two factors affect her decision to exit for another foraging trip: her current food load and its rate of change. Sensing these variables can be attributed to the forager’s individual cognitive ability. Here, new analyses of the foragers’ trajectories within the nest imply a different way to achieve the observed regulation. Instead of an explicit decision to exit, foragers merely tend toward the depth of the nest when their food load is high and toward the nest exit when it is low. Thus, the colony shapes the forager’s trajectory by controlling her unloading rate, while she senses only her current food load. Using an agent-based model and mathematical analysis, we show that this simple mechanism robustly yields emergent regulation of foraging frequency. These findings demonstrate how the embedding of individuals in physical space can reduce their cognitive demands without compromising their computational role in the group. eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2023-04-17 /pmc/articles/PMC10110237/ /pubmed/37067884 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.77659 Text en © 2023, Baltiansky, Frankel et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Computational and Systems Biology Baltiansky, Lior Frankel, Guy Feinerman, Ofer Emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule |
title | Emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule |
title_full | Emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule |
title_fullStr | Emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule |
title_full_unstemmed | Emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule |
title_short | Emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule |
title_sort | emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule |
topic | Computational and Systems Biology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10110237/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37067884 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.77659 |
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