ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Ants adjust their pheromone deposition to a changing environment and their probability of making errors.
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 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Delay-Induced Hopf Bifurcation and Entropy-Based Distributional Uncertainty in a Stochastic Time-Delay Pheromone Feedback Model of Ant Foraging Dynamics.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Combining social and private information: How ants use pheromones and learnt cues to navigate.Learning & behavior · 2026Review
- A biomimetic branching signal-passing tile assembly model with dynamic growth and disassembly.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Ontogeny of collective behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Social structure of perennialEcology and evolution · 2022Article
- Active Inferants: An Active Inference Framework for Ant Colony Behavior.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Trail Pheromone Does Not Modulate Subjective Reward Evaluation inFrontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Food Transport of Red Imported Fire Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) on Vertical Surfaces.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- A locally-blazed ant trail achieves efficient collective navigation despite limited information.eLife · 2016Article
- The Effect of Trail Pheromone and Path Confinement on Learning of Complex Routes in the Ant Lasius niger.PloS one · 2016Article
- Physical and social cues shape nest-site preference and prey capture behavior in social spiders.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Animals must contend with an ever-changing environment. Social animals, especially eusocial insects such as ants and bees, rely heavily on communication for their success. However, in a changing environment, communicated information can become rapidly outdated. This is a particular problem for pheromone trail using ants, as once deposited pheromones cannot be removed. Here, we study the response of ant foragers to an environmental change. Ants were trained to one feeder location, and the feeder was then moved to a different location. We found that ants responded to an environmental change by strongly upregulating pheromone deposition immediately after experiencing the change. This may help maintain the colony's foraging flexibility, and allow multiple food locations to be exploited simultaneously. Our treatment also caused uncertainty in the foragers, by making their memories less reliable. Ants which had made an error but eventually found the food source upregulated pheromone deposition when returning to the nest. Intriguingly, ants on their way towards the food source downregulated pheromone deposition if they were going to make an error. This may suggest that individual ants can measure the reliability of their own memories and respond appropriately.
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