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Evolution of self-organised division of labour driven by stigmergy in leaf-cutter ants
Social insects owe their widespread success to their ability to efficiently coordinate behaviour to carry out complex tasks. Several leaf-cutter ant species employ an advanced type of division of labour known as task partitioning, where the task of retrieving leaves is distributed between workers th...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9768137/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36539468 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26324-6 |
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author | Di Pietro, Viviana Govoni, Patrick Chan, Kin Ho Oliveira, Ricardo Caliari Wenseleers, Tom van den Berg, Pieter |
author_facet | Di Pietro, Viviana Govoni, Patrick Chan, Kin Ho Oliveira, Ricardo Caliari Wenseleers, Tom van den Berg, Pieter |
author_sort | Di Pietro, Viviana |
collection | PubMed |
description | Social insects owe their widespread success to their ability to efficiently coordinate behaviour to carry out complex tasks. Several leaf-cutter ant species employ an advanced type of division of labour known as task partitioning, where the task of retrieving leaves is distributed between workers that cut and drop and those that collect the fallen leaves. It is not entirely clear how such highly coordinated behaviour can evolve, as it would seem to require the simultaneous mutations of multiple traits during the same generation. Here, we use an agent-based simulation model to show how task partitioning in leaf-cutter ants can gradually evolve by exploiting stigmergy (indirect coordination through the environment) through gravity (leaves falling from the treetop on the ground forming a cache). Our simple model allows independent variation in two core behavioural dimensions: the tendency to drop leaves and the tendency to pick up dropped leaves. Task partitioning readily evolves even under these minimal assumptions through adaptation to an arboreal environment where traveling up and down the tree is costly. Additionally, we analyse ant movement dynamics to demonstrate how the ants achieve efficient task allocation through task switching and negative feedback control. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9768137 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-97681372022-12-22 Evolution of self-organised division of labour driven by stigmergy in leaf-cutter ants Di Pietro, Viviana Govoni, Patrick Chan, Kin Ho Oliveira, Ricardo Caliari Wenseleers, Tom van den Berg, Pieter Sci Rep Article Social insects owe their widespread success to their ability to efficiently coordinate behaviour to carry out complex tasks. Several leaf-cutter ant species employ an advanced type of division of labour known as task partitioning, where the task of retrieving leaves is distributed between workers that cut and drop and those that collect the fallen leaves. It is not entirely clear how such highly coordinated behaviour can evolve, as it would seem to require the simultaneous mutations of multiple traits during the same generation. Here, we use an agent-based simulation model to show how task partitioning in leaf-cutter ants can gradually evolve by exploiting stigmergy (indirect coordination through the environment) through gravity (leaves falling from the treetop on the ground forming a cache). Our simple model allows independent variation in two core behavioural dimensions: the tendency to drop leaves and the tendency to pick up dropped leaves. Task partitioning readily evolves even under these minimal assumptions through adaptation to an arboreal environment where traveling up and down the tree is costly. Additionally, we analyse ant movement dynamics to demonstrate how the ants achieve efficient task allocation through task switching and negative feedback control. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-12-20 /pmc/articles/PMC9768137/ /pubmed/36539468 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26324-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Di Pietro, Viviana Govoni, Patrick Chan, Kin Ho Oliveira, Ricardo Caliari Wenseleers, Tom van den Berg, Pieter Evolution of self-organised division of labour driven by stigmergy in leaf-cutter ants |
title | Evolution of self-organised division of labour driven by stigmergy in leaf-cutter ants |
title_full | Evolution of self-organised division of labour driven by stigmergy in leaf-cutter ants |
title_fullStr | Evolution of self-organised division of labour driven by stigmergy in leaf-cutter ants |
title_full_unstemmed | Evolution of self-organised division of labour driven by stigmergy in leaf-cutter ants |
title_short | Evolution of self-organised division of labour driven by stigmergy in leaf-cutter ants |
title_sort | evolution of self-organised division of labour driven by stigmergy in leaf-cutter ants |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9768137/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36539468 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26324-6 |
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