ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
From foraging trails to transport networks: how the quality-distance trade-off shapes network structure.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- Strong and weak environmental perturbations cause contrasting restructure of ant transportation networks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Random walks with spatial and temporal resets can explain individual and colony-level searching patterns in ants.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Competition and habitat availability interact to structure arboreal ant communities across scales of ecological organization.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The evolution of intergroup cooperation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Foraging strategies of fungal mycelial networks: responses to quantity and distance of new resources.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2023Article
- From inter-group conflict to inter-group cooperation: insights from social insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Behavioural variation among workers promotes feed-forward loops in a simulated insect colony.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Better tired than lost: Turtle ant trail networks favor coherence over short edges.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biological systems are typically dependent on transportation networks for the efficient distribution of resources and information. Revealing the decentralized mechanisms underlying the generative process of these networks is key in our global understanding of their functions and is of interest to design, manage and improve human transport systems. Ants are a particularly interesting taxon to address these issues because some species build multi-sink multi-source transport networks analogous to human ones. Here, by combining empirical field data and modelling at several scales of description, we show that pre-existing mechanisms of recruitment with positive feedback involved in foraging can account for the structure of complex ant transport networks. Specifically, we find that emergent group-level properties of these empirical networks, such as robustness, efficiency and cost, can arise from models built on simple individual-level behaviour addressing a quality-distance trade-off by the means of pheromone trails. Our work represents a first step in developing a theory for the generation of effective multi-source multi-sink transport networks based on combining exploration and positive reinforcement of best sources.
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