Abstract
Social insects, such as ants, use various pheromones as their social signal. In addition, they use the presence of other ants for decision-making. In this study, we attempted to evaluate if individual decision-making is influenced by the complementary use of pheromones and presence of other ants. Ants were induced to form a one-way flow system. We found that when ants entered such a system at a right angle, they tended to move in the opposite direction of the one-way flow system. Interestingly, the target ants moved randomly in the experiments in which no ant and/or no pheromone trails were present. We also developed simulation algorithms and found that artificial ant foragers could reach a certain goal more often if they adopted the reverse run (similar mechanism found in ant experiments) over the forward run (moving in the same direction as their nestmates).
Highlights
Social insects, such as ants, use various pheromones as their social signal
Black garden ants Lasius niger decrease the rates of pheromone depositions when they encounter their nestmates on the trail and at the food source, suggesting that ant foragers may modulate the overpopulation on a foraging route based on physical contact with the nestmates[13,15]
(2) Individual naïve ants were allowed to join the ant traffic at right angles to a pheromone trail to judge whether they choose both sides if they do not modify their movements when coming in contact with ant nestmates on the t rail[20]
Summary
Social insects, such as ants, use various pheromones as their social signal. In addition, they use the presence of other ants for decision-making. Argentine ant foragers modify their travel direction by reacting to the gradient of pheromone concentrations, suggesting that ants continuously update their travel direction by scanning pheromone concentrations around them[5] They may consider other factors in addition to the pheromone trail, such as geometrical information, route memory, and the presence of other ants, which may result in the selection of a path among multiple paths[8–11] ant workers modulate trail following, which may depend on factors such as visual information[12]. Few studies have focused on the orientation cue on a pheromone trail at individual-level and its relation with the presence of other ants several researches have reported that L. niger workers could modify their actions on a pheromone trail, as already mentioned We tackled this issue and investigated a possibility that contacting other ants oriented L. niger workers on a pheromone trail toward a certain direction. We developed a multiagent-based model to evaluate the mechanistic understanding of the action of individual ants
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