ArticlePLoS computational biology2018
Regulation of harvester ant foraging as a closed-loop excitable system.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
- Delay-Induced Hopf Bifurcation and Entropy-Based Distributional Uncertainty in a Stochastic Time-Delay Pheromone Feedback Model of Ant Foraging Dynamics.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- 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 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
- Socially driven negative feedback regulates activity and energy use in ant colonies.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- 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
- A real-time feedback system stabilises the regulation of worker reproduction under various colony sizes.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- The red harvester ant.Nature methods · 2022Article
- Article
- Hysteresis stabilizes dynamic control of self-assembled army ant constructions.Nature communications · 2022Article
- 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
- Spatially and temporally distributed data foraging decisions in disciplinary field science.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2021Article
- Article
- Gene expression variation in the brains of harvester ant foragers is associated with collective behavior.Communications biology · 2020Article
- Multiple nest entrances alter foraging and information transfer in ants.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Individual and collective encoding of risk in animal groups.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ant colonies regulate activity in response to changing conditions without using centralized control. Desert harvester ant colonies forage for seeds, and regulate foraging to manage a tradeoff between spending and obtaining water. Foragers lose water while outside in the dry air, but ants obtain water by metabolizing the fats in the seeds they eat. Previous work shows that the rate at which an outgoing forager leaves the nest depends on its recent rate of brief antennal contacts with incoming foragers carrying food. We examine how this process can yield foraging rates that are robust to uncertainty and responsive to temperature and humidity across minute-to-hour timescales. To explore possible mechanisms, we develop a low-dimensional analytical model with a small number of parameters that captures observed foraging behavior. The model uses excitability dynamics to represent response to interactions inside the nest and a random delay distribution to represent foraging time outside the nest. We show how feedback from outgoing foragers returning to the nest stabilizes the incoming and outgoing foraging rates to a common value determined by the volatility of available foragers. The model exhibits a critical volatility above which there is sustained foraging at a constant rate and below which foraging stops. To explain how foraging rates adjust to temperature and humidity, we propose that foragers modify their volatility after they leave the nest and become exposed to the environment. Our study highlights the importance of feedback in the regulation of foraging activity and shows how modulation of volatility can explain how foraging activity responds to conditions and varies across colonies. Our model elucidates the role of feedback across many timescales in collective behavior, and may be generalized to other systems driven by excitable dynamics, such as neuronal networks.
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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.