ArticleScientific reports2018
A distributed algorithm to maintain and repair the trail networks of arboreal ants.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Strong and weak environmental perturbations cause contrasting restructure of ant transportation networks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Colony life history of the tropical arboreal ant,Insectes sociaux · 2024Article
- Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Distributed algorithms from arboreal ants for the shortest path problem.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Measuring collective behavior: an ecological approach.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
- Active Inferants: An Active Inference Framework for Ant Colony Behavior.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Neural and phenotypic representation under the free-energy principle.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Food Transport of Red Imported Fire Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) on Vertical Surfaces.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Distributed Adaptive Search in T Cells: Lessons From Ants.Frontiers in immunology · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We study how the arboreal turtle ant (Cephalotes goniodontus) solves a fundamental computing problem: maintaining a trail network and finding alternative paths to route around broken links in the network. Turtle ants form a routing backbone of foraging trails linking several nests and temporary food sources. This species travels only in the trees, so their foraging trails are constrained to lie on a natural graph formed by overlapping branches and vines in the tangled canopy. Links between branches, however, can be ephemeral, easily destroyed by wind, rain, or animal movements. Here we report a biologically feasible distributed algorithm, parameterized using field data, that can plausibly describe how turtle ants maintain the routing backbone and find alternative paths to circumvent broken links in the backbone. We validate the ability of this probabilistic algorithm to circumvent simulated breaks in synthetic and real-world networks, and we derive an analytic explanation for why certain features are crucial to improve the algorithm's success. Our proposed algorithm uses fewer computational resources than common distributed graph search algorithms, and thus may be useful in other domains, such as for swarm computing or for coordinating molecular robots.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.