ArticleNature communications2017
Ants regulate colony spatial organization using multiple chemical road-signs.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social organization and physical environment shape the microbiome of harvester ants.Animal microbiome · 2025Article
- Phenomenon of reproductive plasticity in ants.Current opinion in insect science · 2024Review
- Emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule.eLife · 2023Article
- Neural Assemblies as Precursors for Brain Function.NeuroSci · 2022Article
- Two simple movement mechanisms for spatial division of labour in social insects.Nature communications · 2022Article
- A Data-Driven Simulation of the Trophallactic Network and Intranidal Food Flow Dissemination in Ants.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Comparative analysis of experimental testing procedures for the elicitation of rescue actions in ants.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Integrating real-time data analysis into automatic tracking of social insects.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
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- Food Transport of Red Imported Fire Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) on Vertical Surfaces.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Waste deposition in leaf-cutting ants is guided by olfactory cues from waste.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2019Article
- Interdisciplinary approaches for uncovering the impacts of architecture on collective behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Architecture, space and information in constructions built by humans and social insects: a conceptual review.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
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- Spatial fidelity of workers predicts collective response to disturbance in a social insect.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Chemical footprints mediate habitat selection in co-occurring aphids.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Communication provides the basis for social life. In ant colonies, the prevalence of local, often chemically mediated, interactions introduces strong links between communication networks and the spatial distribution of ants. It is, however, unknown how ants identify and maintain nest chambers with distinct functions. Here, we combine individual tracking, chemical analysis and machine learning to decipher the chemical signatures present on multiple nest surfaces. We present evidence for several distinct chemical 'road-signs' that guide the ants' movements within the dark nest. These chemical signatures can be used to classify nest chambers with different functional roles. Using behavioural manipulations, we demonstrate that at least three of these chemical signatures are functionally meaningful and allow ants from different task groups to identify their specific nest destinations, thus facilitating colony coordination and stabilization. The use of multiple chemicals that assist spatiotemporal guidance, segregation and pattern formation is abundant in multi-cellular organisms. Here, we provide a rare example for the use of these principles in the ant colony.
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