MAS Seminar, speaker Bob Planqué
About flexible house hunting strategies in social insects.
Room: M279, tea starting at 10.00
Speaker: Bob Planqué, UvA,
The study of decentralized decision making in social insects and other groups of social animals has revealed a number of prominent mechanisms such as positive feedback, inhibition of behaviours and response thresholds.
One of the prime examples in which many of these behaviours are employed to form collective decisions is house hunting by colonies of ants. When their old nest is destroyed, scouts go looking for potential new nests, recruit other ants to these nests through a process called tandem-running, and switch from recruitment to carrying by monitoring if a quorum of ants has been reached inside a new nest. Using these different behaviours allows the ants to efficiently trade speed for accuracy when deciding which nest to emigrate to.
One of the behaviours commonly observed during colony emigrations has sparked much speculation, and does not fit the above emigration paradigm: reverse tandem running from the new to the old nest. Although ants are usually regarded as simple automatons obeying innate rules, close scrutiny reveals that they are capable of rich individual behaviour, including learning and even teaching others.
In this talk Bob Planqué will highlight the challenges to model such behaviour in order to understand collective decision making in these ants. Then, using a number of models, we will explore different hypotheses that might explain the role of reverse tandem running.
