ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Army ants dynamically adjust living bridges in response to a cost-benefit trade-off.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 147 citations in OpenAlex.
- Independent evolution of a living bridge in the old world army ant lineage.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2026Article
- Recent Advances in Collective Behaviors of Micro/Nanomotor Swarms.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Review
- Modular shape-changing tensegrity-blocks enable self-assembling robotic structures.Nature communications · 2025Article
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- Femtosecond laser writing of ant-inspired reconfigurable microbot collectives.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Snail-inspired robotic swarms: a hybrid connector drives collective adaptation in unstructured outdoor environments.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Nonlinear social evolution and the emergence of collective action.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Motile Living Biobots Self-Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Sensory collectives in natural systems.eLife · 2023Review
- Collective Behaviors of Isotropic Micromotors: From Assembly to Reconstruction and Motion Control under External Fields.Nanomaterials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Beyond Nature Versus Nurture: the Emergence of Emotion.Affective science · 2023Review
- Ontogeny of collective behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Distributed algorithms from arboreal ants for the shortest path problem.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Strength-mass scaling law governs mass distribution inside honey bee swarms.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Ordering and topological defects in social wasps' nests.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Hysteresis stabilizes dynamic control of self-assembled army ant constructions.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Searching for structure in collective systems.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2021Article
- Better tired than lost: Turtle ant trail networks favor coherence over short edges.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability of individual animals to create functional structures by joining together is rare and confined to the social insects. Army ants (Eciton) form collective assemblages out of their own bodies to perform a variety of functions that benefit the entire colony. Here we examine ‟bridges" of linked individuals that are constructed to span gaps in the colony's foraging trail. How these living structures adjust themselves to varied and changing conditions remains poorly understood. Our field experiments show that the ants continuously modify their bridges, such that these structures lengthen, widen, and change position in response to traffic levels and environmental geometry. Ants initiate bridges where their path deviates from their incoming direction and move the bridges over time to create shortcuts over large gaps. The final position of the structure depended on the intensity of the traffic and the extent of path deviation and was influenced by a cost-benefit trade-off at the colony level, where the benefit of increased foraging trail efficiency was balanced by the cost of removing workers from the foraging pool to form the structure. To examine this trade-off, we quantified the geometric relationship between costs and benefits revealed by our experiments. We then constructed a model to determine the bridge location that maximized foraging rate, which qualitatively matched the observed movement of bridges. Our results highlight how animal self-assemblages can be dynamically modified in response to a group-level cost-benefit trade-off, without any individual unit's having information on global benefits or costs.
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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.