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The costs and benefits of decentralization and centralization of ant colonies.

ABSTRACT: A challenge faced by individuals and groups of many species is determining how resources and activities should be spatially distributed: centralized or decentralized. This distribution problem is hard to understand due to the many costs and benefits of each strategy in different settings. Ant colonies are faced by this problem and demonstrate two solutions: 1) centralizing resources in a single nest (monodomy) and 2) decentralizing by spreading resources across many nests (polydomy). Despite the possibilities for using this system to study the centralization/decentralization problem, the trade-offs associated with using either polydomy or monodomy are poorly understood due to a lack of empirical data and cohesive theory. Here, we present a dynamic network model of a population of ant nests which is based on observations of a facultatively polydomous ant species (Formica lugubris). We use the model to test several key hypotheses for costs and benefits of polydomy and monodomy and show that decentralization is advantageous when resource acquisition costs are high, nest size is limited, resources are clustered, and there is a risk of nest destruction, but centralization prevails when resource availability fluctuates and nest size is limited. Our model explains the phylogenetic and ecological diversity of polydomous ants, demonstrates several trade-offs of decentralization and centralization, and provides testable predictions for empirical work on ants and in other systems.

SUBMITTER: Burns DDR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6838651 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The costs and benefits of decentralization and centralization of ant colonies.

Burns Dominic D R DDR Pitchford Jon W JW Parr Catherine L CL Franks Daniel W DW Robinson Elva J H EJH

Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology 20190814 6

A challenge faced by individuals and groups of many species is determining how resources and activities should be spatially distributed: centralized or decentralized. This distribution problem is hard to understand due to the many costs and benefits of each strategy in different settings. Ant colonies are faced by this problem and demonstrate two solutions: 1) centralizing resources in a single nest (monodomy) and 2) decentralizing by spreading resources across many nests (polydomy). Despite the ...[more]

PMID: 31723318

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Project description:Allocation of goods is a key feature in defining the connection between the individual and the collective scale in any society. Both the process by which goods are to be distributed, and the resulting allocation to the members of the society may affect the success of the population as a whole. One of the most striking natural examples of a highly successful cooperative society is the ant colony which often acts as a single superorganism. In particular, each individual within the ant colony has a "communal stomach" which is used to store and share food with the other colony members by mouth to mouth feeding. Sharing food between communal stomachs allows the colony as a whole to get its food requirements and, more so, allows each individual within the colony to reach its nutritional intake target. The vast majority of colony members do not forage independently but obtain their food through secondary interactions in which food is exchanged between individuals. The global effect of this exchange is not well understood. To gain better understanding into this process we used fluorescence imaging to measure how food from a single external source is distributed and mixed within a Camponotus sanctus ant colony. Using entropic measures to quantify food-blending, we show that while collected food flows into all parts of the colony it mixes only partly. We show that mixing is controlled by the ants' interaction rule which implies that only a fraction of the maximal potential is actually transferred. This rule leads to a robust blending process: i.e., neither the exact food volume that is transferred, nor the interaction schedule are essential to generate the global outcome. Finally, we show how the ants' interaction rules may optimize a trade-off between fast dissemination and efficient mixing. Our results regarding the distribution of a single food source provide a baseline for future studies on distributed regulation of multiple food sources in social insect colonies.

Project description:INTRODUCTION: The accurate packing of protein side chains is important for many computational biology problems, such as ab initio protein structure prediction, homology modelling, and protein design and ligand docking applications. Many of existing solutions are modelled as a computational optimisation problem. As well as the design of search algorithms, most solutions suffer from an inaccurate energy function for judging whether a prediction is good or bad. Even if the search has found the lowest energy, there is no certainty of obtaining the protein structures with correct side chains. METHODS: We present a side-chain modelling method, pacoPacker, which uses a parallel ant colony optimisation strategy based on sharing a single pheromone matrix. This parallel approach combines different sources of energy functions and generates protein side-chain conformations with the lowest energies jointly determined by the various energy functions. We further optimised the selected rotamers to construct subrotamer by rotamer minimisation, which reasonably improved the discreteness of the rotamer library. RESULTS: We focused on improving the accuracy of side-chain conformation prediction. For a testing set of 442 proteins, 87.19% of X1 and 77.11% of X12 angles were predicted correctly within 40° of the X-ray positions. We compared the accuracy of pacoPacker with state-of-the-art methods, such as CIS-RR and SCWRL4. We analysed the results from different perspectives, in terms of protein chain and individual residues. In this comprehensive benchmark testing, 51.5% of proteins within a length of 400 amino acids predicted by pacoPacker were superior to the results of CIS-RR and SCWRL4 simultaneously. Finally, we also showed the advantage of using the subrotamers strategy. All results confirmed that our parallel approach is competitive to state-of-the-art solutions for packing side chains. CONCLUSIONS: This parallel approach combines various sources of searching intelligence and energy functions to pack protein side chains. It provides a frame-work for combining different inaccuracy/usefulness objective functions by designing parallel heuristic search algorithms.

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The costs and benefits of decentralization and centralization of ant colonies.

Publications

The costs and benefits of decentralization and centralization of ant colonies.

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