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Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance

Social insect colonies use negative as well as positive feedback signals to regulate foraging behaviour. In ants and bees individual foragers have been observed to use negative pheromones or mechano-auditory signals to indicate that forage sources are not ideal, for example being unrewarded, crowded...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Reina, Andreagiovanni, Marshall, James A. R.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9154117/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35584189
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010090
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author Reina, Andreagiovanni
Marshall, James A. R.
author_facet Reina, Andreagiovanni
Marshall, James A. R.
author_sort Reina, Andreagiovanni
collection PubMed
description Social insect colonies use negative as well as positive feedback signals to regulate foraging behaviour. In ants and bees individual foragers have been observed to use negative pheromones or mechano-auditory signals to indicate that forage sources are not ideal, for example being unrewarded, crowded, or dangerous. Here we propose an additional function for negative feedback signals during foraging, variance reduction. We show that while on average populations will converge to desired distributions over forage patches both with and without negative feedback signals, in small populations negative feedback reduces variation around the target distribution compared to the use of positive feedback alone. Our results are independent of the nature of the target distribution, providing it can be achieved by foragers collecting only local information. Since robustness is a key aim for biological systems, and deviation from target foraging distributions may be costly, we argue that this could be a further important and hitherto overlooked reason that negative feedback signals are used by foraging social insects.
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spelling pubmed-91541172022-06-01 Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance Reina, Andreagiovanni Marshall, James A. R. PLoS Comput Biol Research Article Social insect colonies use negative as well as positive feedback signals to regulate foraging behaviour. In ants and bees individual foragers have been observed to use negative pheromones or mechano-auditory signals to indicate that forage sources are not ideal, for example being unrewarded, crowded, or dangerous. Here we propose an additional function for negative feedback signals during foraging, variance reduction. We show that while on average populations will converge to desired distributions over forage patches both with and without negative feedback signals, in small populations negative feedback reduces variation around the target distribution compared to the use of positive feedback alone. Our results are independent of the nature of the target distribution, providing it can be achieved by foragers collecting only local information. Since robustness is a key aim for biological systems, and deviation from target foraging distributions may be costly, we argue that this could be a further important and hitherto overlooked reason that negative feedback signals are used by foraging social insects. Public Library of Science 2022-05-18 /pmc/articles/PMC9154117/ /pubmed/35584189 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010090 Text en © 2022 Reina, Marshall https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Reina, Andreagiovanni
Marshall, James A. R.
Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance
title Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance
title_full Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance
title_fullStr Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance
title_full_unstemmed Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance
title_short Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance
title_sort negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9154117/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35584189
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010090
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