ArticleNature communications2022
Hysteresis stabilizes dynamic control of self-assembled army ant constructions.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 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.
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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.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- A mechanistic understanding of collective escape in starling flocks.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Independent evolution of a living bridge in the old world army ant lineage.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2026Article
- Nonequilibrium Self-Assembly Control by the Stochastic Landscape Method.Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2025Article
- Minding the gap between artificial and biological computing paradigms for biologically loyal AI.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2025Article
- Self-Organized Patterns in Non-Reciprocal Active Droplet Systems.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2024Article
- A simple mechanism for collective decision-making in the absence of payoff information.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Ontogeny of collective behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Steering self-organisation through confinement.Soft matter · 2023Review
- Article
- Hysteresis stabilizes dynamic control of self-assembled army ant constructions.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Baboon travel progressions as a "social spandrel" in collective animal behaviour.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biological systems must adjust to changing external conditions, and their resilience depends on their control mechanisms. How is dynamic control implemented in noisy, decentralized systems? Army ants' self-assembled bridges are built on unstable features, like leaves, which frequently move. Using field experiments and simulations, we characterize the bridges' response as the gaps they span change in size, identify the control mechanism, and explore how this emerges from individuals' decisions. For a given gap size, bridges were larger after the gap increased rather than decreased. This hysteresis was best explained by an accumulator model, in which individual decisions to join or leave a bridge depend on the difference between its current and equilibrium state. This produces robust collective structures that adjust to lasting perturbations while ignoring small, momentary shifts. Our field data support separate joining and leaving cues; joining is prompted by high bridge performance and leaving by an excess of ants. This leads to stabilizing hysteresis, an important feature of many biological and engineered systems.
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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.