Foraging through multiple nest holes: An impediment to collective decision-making in ants.

ABSTRACT: In social insects, collective choices between food sources are based on self-organized mechanisms where information about resources are locally processed by the foragers. Such a collective decision emerges from the competition between pheromone trails leading to different resources but also between the recruiting stimuli emitted by successful foragers at nest entrances. In this study, we investigated how an additional nest entrance influences the ability of Myrmica rubra ant colonies to exploit two food sources of different quality (1M and 0.1M sucrose solution) and to select the most rewarding one. We found that the mobilisation of workers doubled in two-entrance nests compared to one-entrance nests but that ants were less likely to reach a food source once they exited the nest. Moreover,

SUBMITTER: Lehue M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7329192 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature