ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Emergent oscillations assist obstacle negotiation during ant cooperative transport.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- A mechanical route for cooperative transport in autonomous robotic swarms.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Maximal response to a mechanical leader at critical group size in ant collectives.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Leaderless consensus decision-making determines cooperative transport direction in weaver ants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Ant waves-Spontaneous activity waves in fire-ant columns.Science advances · 2023Article
- Article
- Ant collective cognition allows for efficient navigation through disordered environments.eLife · 2020Article
- Scale-Free Dynamics in Animal Groups and Brain Networks.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2020Article
- Bi-stability in cooperative transport by ants in the presence of obstacles.PLoS computational biology · 2018Article
- Cooperative Object Transport in Multi-Robot Systems: A Review of the State-of-the-Art.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
Collective motion by animal groups is affected by internal interactions, external constraints, and the influx of information. A quantitative understanding of how these different factors give rise to different modes of collective motion is, at present, lacking. Here, we study how ants that cooperatively transport a large food item react to an obstacle blocking their path. Combining experiments with a statistical physics model of mechanically coupled active agents, we show that the constraint induces a deterministic collective oscillatory mode that facilitates obstacle circumvention. We provide direct experimental evidence, backed by theory, that this motion is an emergent group effect that does not require any behavioral changes at the individual level. We trace these relaxation oscillations to the interplay between two forces; informed ants pull the load toward the nest whereas uninformed ants contribute to the motion's persistence along the tangential direction. The model's predictions that oscillations appear above a critical system size, that the group can spontaneously transition into its ordered phase, and that the system can exhibit complete rotations are all verified experimentally. We expect that similar oscillatory modes emerge in collective motion scenarios where the structure of the environment imposes conflicts between individually held information and the group's tendency for cohesiveness.
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