Record dynamics in ants.

Thomas O Richardson,Nigel R Franks,Ana B Sendova-Franks,Henrik J Jensen,Kim Christensen,Elva J H Robinson

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009621

Abstract

The success of social animals (including ourselves) can be attributed to efficiencies that arise from a division of labour. Many animal societies have a communal nest which certain individuals must leave to perform external tasks, for example foraging or patrolling. Staying at home to care for young or leaving to find food is one of the most fundamental divisions of labour. It is also often a choice between safety and danger. Here we explore the regulation of departures from ant nests. We consider the extreme situation in which no one returns and show experimentally that exiting decisions seem to be governed by fluctuating record signals and ant-ant interactions. A record signal is a new ‘high water mark’ in the history of a system. An ant exiting the nest only when the record signal reaches a level it has never perceived before could be a very effective mechanism to postpone, until the last possible moment, a potentially fatal decision. We also show that record dynamics may be involved in first exits by individually tagged ants even when their nest mates are allowed to re-enter the nest. So record dynamics may play a role in allocating individuals to tasks, both in emergencies and in everyday life. The dynamics of several complex but purely physical systems are also based on record signals but this is the first time they have been experimentally shown in a biological system.

Highlights

Ant societies are shaped by selection that operates, in part, at the level of the colony [1], so the success of the individual is intimately bound to that of its colony
The temporal statistics are compatible with record dynamics
We found that ant exits were compatible with a record dynamics process while the null model could not reproduce the observed statistics

Summary

Introduction

Ant societies are shaped by selection that operates, in part, at the level of the colony [1], so the success of the individual is intimately bound to that of its colony. The life-cycles of ant societies are dominated by growth or decline [2]. They are rarely at a steady state and are typically non-stationary. We induce non-stationarity by permanently eliminating all ants that exit the nest and compare these colonies with controls in which ants can freely leave and re-enter the nest. We use analytical methods developed for the analysis of out-ofequilibrium physical systems to explore the nature of the mechanism governing the decisions of individual ants to leave the nest. Biological systems are, like other systems in Nature, generically non-equilibrium systems since they are not isolated from external influences and continuously have a flux of mass or energy passing through them [3]

Methods

Results

Conclusion