ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2020
Negative feedback: ants choose unoccupied over occupied food sources and lay more pheromone to them.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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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
13 citing papers in PubMed, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- A bitter receptor links chemical detection to adaptive foraging avoidance in fire ants.Pest management science · 2026Article
- A high-throughput and sensitive method for food preference assays in the argentine ant.Pest management science · 2025Article
- Side bias behaviour in dogs (Canis familiaris) is influenced by task complexity.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Toxic bait abandonment by an invasive ant is driven by aversive memories.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Walk this way: modeling foraging ant dynamics in multiple food source environments.Journal of mathematical biology · 2024Article
- Ontogeny of collective behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Ants prefer the option they are trained to first.The Journal of experimental biology · 2022Article
- Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Ant Lasius niger joining one-way trails go against the flow.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Embodiment in distributed information processing: "Solid" plants versus "liquid" ant colonies.Quantitative plant biology · 2022Review
- Negative feedback: ants choose unoccupied over occupied food sources and lay more pheromone to them.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Trail Pheromone Does Not Modulate Subjective Reward Evaluation inFrontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Foraging through multiple nest holes: An impediment to collective decision-making in ants.PloS one · 2020Article
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
In order to make effective collective decisions, ants lay pheromone trails to lead nest-mates to acceptable food sources. The strength of a trail informs other ants about the quality of a food source, allowing colonies to exploit the most profitable resources. However, recruiting too many ants to a single food source can lead to over-exploitation, queuing, and thus decreased food intake for the colony. The nonlinear nature of pheromonal recruitment can also lead colonies to become trapped in suboptimal decisions, if the environment changes. Negative feedback systems can ameliorate these problems. We investigated a potential source of negative feedback: whether the presence of nest-mates makes food sources more or less attractive.
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.