ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Distributed nestmate recognition in ants.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Division of labour in colony defence in a clonal ant.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The life history of harvester ant colonies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Non-lethal fungal infection could reduce aggression towards strangers in ants.Communications biology · 2023Article
- The gut microbiome defines social group membership in honey bee colonies.Science advances · 2020Article
- Mechanisms of recognition in birds and social Hymenoptera: from detection to information processing.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Phenotypic Plasticity of Nest-Mate Recognition Cues in Formica exsecta Ants.Journal of chemical ecology · 2019Article
- The cuticular hydrocarbon profiles of honey bee workers develop via a socially-modulated innate process.eLife · 2019Article
- Exploring Interactions between the Gut Microbiota and Social Behavior through Nutrition.Genes · 2018Review
- Learning Distinct Chemical Labels of Nestmates in Ants.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2018Article
- Conflicts of interest improve collective computation of adaptive social structures.Science advances · 2018Article
- What are the Mechanisms Behind a Parasite-Induced Decline in Nestmate Recognition in Ants?Journal of chemical ecology · 2017Article
- Article
- Location-specific cuticular hydrocarbon signals in a social insect.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Article
- Article
- The Effect of Social Parasitism by Polyergus breviceps on the Nestmate Recognition System of Its Host, Formica altipetens.PloS one · 2016Article
- From division of labor to the collective behavior of social insects.Behavioral ecology and sociobiologyReview
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We propose a distributed model of nestmate recognition, analogous to the one used by the vertebrate immune system, in which colony response results from the diverse reactions of many ants. The model describes how individual behaviour produces colony response to non-nestmates. No single ant knows the odour identity of the colony. Instead, colony identity is defined collectively by all the ants in the colony. Each ant responds to the odour of other ants by reference to its own unique decision boundary, which is a result of its experience of encounters with other ants. Each ant thus recognizes a particular set of chemical profiles as being those of non-nestmates. This model predicts, as experimental results have shown, that the outcome of behavioural assays is likely to be variable, that it depends on the number of ants tested, that response to non-nestmates changes over time and that it changes in response to the experience of individual ants. A distributed system allows a colony to identify non-nestmates without requiring that all individuals have the same complete information and helps to facilitate the tracking of changes in cuticular hydrocarbon profiles, because only a subset of ants must respond to provide an adequate response.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.