Abstract
Social animals can use both social and private information to guide decision making. While social information can be relatively economical to acquire, it can lead to maladaptive information cascades if attention to environmental cues is supplanted by unconditional copying. Ants frequently employ pheromone trails, a form of social information, to guide collective processes, and this can include consensus decisions made when choosing a place to live. In this study, I examine how house-hunting ants balance social and private information when these information sources conflict to different degrees. Social information, in the form of pre-established pheromone trails, strongly influenced the decision process in choices between equivalent nests, and lead to a reduced relocation time. When trails lead to non-preferred types of nest, however, social information had less influence when this preference was weak and no influence when the preference was strong. These results suggest that social information is vetted against private information during the house-hunting process in this species. Private information is favoured in cases of conflict and this may help insure colonies against costly wrong decisions.
Highlights
Being well informed can mean the difference between a good and bad decision
Once a trail is established, it may be difficult to switch targets [26,27,28]. This represents a form of information cascade [9] as individuals continue to make independent assessments, the rapid amplification of initial choices means that social information can soon overwhelm any dissent arising from private information, leading to potentially sub-optimal outcomes at the group level
House-hunting M. nipponica colonies were strongly influenced by existing pheromone trails in choices between equivalent nests, and able to exploit this social information to reduce relocation time
Summary
Being well informed can mean the difference between a good and bad decision. Animals frequently make fitness-critical decisions based on information acquired through individual experience (private information) and via signals or cues from other animals (socially acquired information) [1]. Information cascades arise when individuals copy the behaviour of others without themselves assessing the environmental cues on which the behaviour was based, and can lead to sub-optimal outcomes when the individual copied chooses poorly [2,9]. It is not surprising that many animals weight social or private information differently depending on the environmental context [10,11,12,13,14]. It remains unclear, in which context one form of information should be favoured over the other [7,11]
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