ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2015
Local cost minimization in ant transport networks: from small-scale data to large-scale trade-offs.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Better tired than lost: Turtle ant trail networks favor coherence over short edges.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- From foraging trails to transport networks: how the quality-distance trade-off shapes network structure.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Efficiency and shrinking in evolving networks.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2019Article
- A distributed algorithm to maintain and repair the trail networks of arboreal ants.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- A locally-blazed ant trail achieves efficient collective navigation despite limited information.eLife · 2016Article
- The costs and benefits of decentralization and centralization of ant colonies.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Central place foraging in an ectotherm and the long-term liability of selecting the "wrong" central place.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Transport networks distribute resources and information in many human and biological systems. Their construction requires optimization and balance of conflicting criteria such as robustness against disruptions, transport efficiency and building cost. The colonies of the polydomous Australian meat ant Iridomyrmex purpureus are a striking example of such a decentralized network, consisting of trails that connect spatially separated nests. Here we study the rules that underlie network construction in these ants. We find that a simple model of network growth, which we call the minimum linking model (MLM), is sufficient to explain the growth of real ant colonies. For larger networks, the MLM shows a qualitative similarity with a Euclidean minimum spanning tree, prioritizing cost and efficiency over robustness. We introduce a variant of our model to show that a balance between cost, efficiency and robustness can be also reproduced at larger scales than ant colonies. Remarkably, such a balance is influenced by a parameter reflecting the specific features of the modelled transport system. The extended MLM could thus be a suitable source of inspiration for the construction of cheap and efficient transport networks with non-zero robustness, suggesting possible applications in the design of human-made networks.
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