ArticlePLoS computational biology2022
Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 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
- A high-throughput and sensitive method for food preference assays in the argentine ant.Pest management science · 2025Article
- Socially driven negative feedback regulates activity and energy use in ant colonies.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Reverse social contagion as a mechanism for regulating mass behaviors in highly integrated social systems.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Social insect colonies use negative as well as positive feedback signals to regulate foraging behaviour. In ants and bees individual foragers have been observed to use negative pheromones or mechano-auditory signals to indicate that forage sources are not ideal, for example being unrewarded, crowded, or dangerous. Here we propose an additional function for negative feedback signals during foraging, variance reduction. We show that while on average populations will converge to desired distributions over forage patches both with and without negative feedback signals, in small populations negative feedback reduces variation around the target distribution compared to the use of positive feedback alone. Our results are independent of the nature of the target distribution, providing it can be achieved by foragers collecting only local information. Since robustness is a key aim for biological systems, and deviation from target foraging distributions may be costly, we argue that this could be a further important and hitherto overlooked reason that negative feedback signals are used by foraging social insects.
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