ArticleFrontiers in ecology and evolution2016
Effect of Interactions between Harvester Ants on Forager Decisions.
Article in Frontiers in ecology and evolution, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 63 citations in OpenAlex.
- Physical crowding truncates intrinsic Lévy-like motility into caste-specific movement regimes in social termites.Movement ecology · 2026Article
- Nest Entrance Architecture and the Regulation of Foraging Activity in Desert Harvester Ants.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Foraging ants as liquid brains: Movement heterogeneity shapes collective efficiency.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The role of dopamine in foraging decisions in social insects.Frontiers in insect science · 2025Review
- The life history of harvester ant colonies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Conserved autism-associated genes tune social feeding behavior in C. elegans.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Ecological principles for the evolution of communication in collective systems.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Long-term tracking of social structure in groups of rats.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Conserved autism-associated genes tune social feeding behavior inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Harvester ant colonies differ in collective behavioural plasticity to regulate water loss.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Emergent regulation of ant foraging frequency through a computationally inexpensive forager movement rule.eLife · 2023Article
- The red harvester ant.Nature methods · 2022Article
- Article
- Measuring collective behavior: an ecological approach.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2021Article
- Movement, Encounter Rate, and Collective Behavior in Ant Colonies.Annals of the Entomological Society of America · 2021Article
- Hive geometry shapes the recruitment rate of honeybee colonies.Journal of mathematical biology · 2021Article
- Rebuild the Academy: Supporting academic mothers during COVID-19 and beyond.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Article
- Active Inferants: An Active Inference Framework for Ant Colony Behavior.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Gene expression variation in the brains of harvester ant foragers is associated with collective behavior.Communications biology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Harvester ant colonies adjust their foraging activity to day-to-day changes in food availability and hour-to-hour changes in environmental conditions. This collective behavior is regulated through interactions, in the form of brief antennal contacts, between outgoing foragers and returning foragers with food. Here we consider how an ant, waiting in the entrance chamber just inside the nest entrance, uses its accumulated experience of interactions to decide whether to leave the nest to forage. Using videos of field observations, we tracked the interactions and foraging decisions of ants in the entrance chamber. Outgoing foragers tended to interact with returning foragers at higher rates than ants that returned to the deeper nest and did not forage. To provide a mechanistic framework for interpreting these results, we develop a decision model in which ants make decisions based upon a noisy accumulation of individual contacts with returning foragers. The model can reproduce core trends and realistic distributions for individual ant interaction statistics, and suggests possible mechanisms by which foraging activity may be regulated at an individual ant level.
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