The effect of social information on the collective choices of ant colonies

Dominic D.R. Burns, Ana B. Sendova-Franks and Nigel R. Franks

Behavioral Ecology, 2016, vol. 27, issue 4, 1033-1040

Abstract: In collective decision making, groups collate social information to inform their decisions. Indeed, societies can gather more information than individuals—so social information can be more reliable than private information. Colonies of Temnothorax albipennis can estimate the average quality of fluctuating nest sites when the sharing of social information through recruitment is rare. However, collective decisions in T. albipennis are often reached with the use of recruitment. We use a new experimental setup to test how colonies react to fluctuating nest sites when they use recruitment to reach a decision. When recruitment is used, colonies consistently choose nest sites that fluctuate between being "good" and "poor" over constantly "mediocre" alternatives. Moreover, they do so even if the fluctuating option is only "good" for 25% of the time. The ants’ preference for fluctuating nest sites appears to be due to tandem running. Even if a nest site is only briefly "good," scouts that experience it when it is "good" are likely to perform tandem runs to it. However, a constantly "mediocre" nest site is unlikely to ever provoke tandem runs. Consequently, the fluctuating nest sites attracted more tandem runs, even when they were only "good" for a short time. This led to quorum attainment in fluctuating nest sites rather than in constant "mediocre" nest sites. The results of this experiment demonstrate how sharing of social information through recruitment can change the outcome of collective decisions.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arw005 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:27:y:2016:i:4:p:1033-1040.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().