ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2017
Spatial organization and interactions of harvester ants during foraging activity.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Nest Entrance Architecture and the Regulation of Foraging Activity in Desert Harvester Ants.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Disruption of collective behaviour correlates with reduced interaction efficiency.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The life history of harvester ant colonies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Reverse social contagion as a mechanism for regulating mass behaviors in highly integrated social systems.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Caterpillar movement mediates spatially local interactions and determines the relationship between population density and contact.Movement ecology · 2024Article
- Colony size buffers interactions between neonicotinoid exposure and cold stress in bumblebees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- 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
- Social networks predict the life and death of honey bees.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors in Rodents.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Review
- Cellular sociology regulates the hierarchical spatial patterning and organization of cells in organisms.Open biology · 2020Review
- The effect of nest topology on spatial organization and recruitment in the red ant Myrmica rubra.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2020Article
- Multiple nest entrances alter foraging and information transfer in ants.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Article
- 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
- How ants move: individual and collective scaling properties.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2018Article
- Spatial fidelity of workers predicts collective response to disturbance in a social insect.Nature communications · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Local interactions, when individuals meet, can regulate collective behaviour. In a system without any central control, the rate of interaction may depend simply on how the individuals move around. But interactions could in turn influence movement; individuals might seek out interactions, or their movement in response to interaction could influence further interaction rates. We develop a general framework to address these questions, using collision theory to establish a baseline expected rate of interaction based on proximity. We test the models using data from harvester ant colonies. A colony uses feedback from interactions inside the nest to regulate foraging activity. Potential foragers leave the nest in response to interactions with returning foragers with food. The time series of interactions and local density of ants show how density hotspots lead to interactions that are clustered in time. A correlated random walk null model describes the mixing of potential and returning foragers. A model from collision theory relates walking speed and spatial proximity with the probability of interaction. The results demonstrate that although ants do not mix homogeneously, trends in interaction patterns can be explained simply by the walking speed and local density of surrounding ants.
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Registered trials
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