Abstract
To find useful work to do for their colony, individual eusocial
animals have to move, somehow staying attentive to relevant
social information. Recent research on individual Temnothorax
albipennis ants moving inside their colony’s nest found a
power-law relationship between a movement’s duration and
its average speed; and a universal speed profile for movements
showing that they mostly fluctuate around a constant average
speed. From this predictability it was inferred that movement
durations are somehow determined before the movement itself.
Here, we find similar results in lone T. albipennis ants exploring
a large arena outside the nest, both when the arena is clean
and when it contains chemical information left by previous
nest-mates. This implies that these movement characteristics
originate from the same individual neural and/or physiological
mechanism(s), operating without immediate regard to social
influences. However, the presence of pheromones and/or other
cues was found to affect the inter-event speed correlations.
Hence we suggest that ants’ motor planning results in
intermittent response to the social environment: movement
duration is adjusted in response to social information only
between movements, not during them. This environmentally
flexible, intermittently responsive movement behaviour points
towards a spatially allocated division of labour in this species.
It also prompts more general questions on collective animal
movement and the role of intermittent causation from higher to
lower organizational levels in the stability of complex systems.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 150534 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Journal | Royal Society Open Science |
Volume | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 13 Jan 2016 |
Research Groups and Themes
- Cognitive Science
- Visual Perception
Keywords
- movement
- motor planning
- self-similarity
- division of labour
- intermittent top-down causality
- complex social systems
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Data from: Ants determine their next move at rest: motor planning and causality in complex systems
Hunt, E. R. (Contributor), Baddeley, R. J. (Contributor), Worley, A. (Contributor), Sendova-Franks, A. B. (Contributor) & Franks, N. R. (Contributor), Dryad, 2 Dec 2015
DOI: 10.5061/dryad.jk53j, http://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.jk53j
Dataset