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Open AccessAsymmetric ommatidia count and behavioural lateralization in the ant Temnothorax albipennis
Workers of the house-hunting ant Temnothorax albipennis rely on visual edge following and landmark recognition to navigate their rocky environment, and they also exhibit a leftward turning bias when exploring unk...
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Article
Open AccessInformation Certainty Determines Social and Private Information Use in Ants
Decision-making in uncertain environments requires animals to evaluate, contrast and integrate various information sources to choose appropriate actions. In consensus-making groups, quorum responses are common...
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Article
Open AccessMigration control: a distance compensation strategy in ants
Migratory behaviour forms an intrinsic part of the life histories of many organisms but is often a high-risk process. Consequently, varied strategies have evolved to negate such risks, but empirical data relat...
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Article
Ants incommunicado: collective decision-making over new nest sites by ants with reduced communication
We study the plasticity of collective decision-making in ants by blocking key aspects of pheromone communication across entire colonies. To achieve this, droplets of paint were applied over the gaster tips of ...
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Article
Open AccessHow ants use quorum sensing to estimate the average quality of a fluctuating resource
We show that one of the advantages of quorum-based decision-making is an ability to estimate the average value of a resource that fluctuates in quality. By using a quorum threshold, namely the number of ants w...
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Article
Commitment time depends on both current and target nest value in Temnothorax albipennis ant colonies
Animals gather noisy information about the world and then process it to trigger appropriate behavioural responses. To identify the best action to take, both the costs and benefits associated with each action s...
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Article
Trail laying during tandem-running recruitment in the ant Temnothorax albipennis
Tandem running is a recruitment strategy whereby one ant leads a single naïve nest mate to a resource. While tandem running progresses towards the goal, the leader ant and the follower ant maintain contact mai...
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Article
Nest-seeking rock ants (Temnothorax albipennis) trade off sediment packing density and structural integrity for ease of cavity excavation
We investigated excavation and nest site choice across sediment-filled cavities in the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Colonies were presented with sediment-filled cavities, covering a spectrum from ones that should ...
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Article
The Interplay Between Scent Trails and Group-Mass Recruitment Systems in Ants
Large ant colonies invariably use effective scent trails to guide copious ant numbers to food sources. The success of mass recruitment hinges on the involvement of many colony members to lay powerful trails. H...
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Article
How is activity distributed among and within tasks in Temnothorax ants?
How social insect colonies behave results from the actions of their workers. Individual variation among workers in their response to various tasks is necessary for the division of labor within colonies. A work...
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Article
Blinkered teaching: tandem running by visually impaired ants
During tandem runs, one ant worker recruits another to an important resource. Here, we begin to investigate how dependent are tandem leaders and followers on visual cues by painting over their compound eyes to...
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Article
Radio tagging reveals the roles of corpulence, experience and social information in ant decision making
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Article
Radio tagging reveals the roles of corpulence, experience and social information in ant decision making
Ant colonies are factories within fortresses (Oster and Wilson 1978). They run on resources foraged from an outside world fraught with danger. On what basis do individual ants decide to leave the safety of the ne...
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Article
Open AccessWhy do not all workers work? Colony size and workload during emigrations in the ant Temnothorax albipennis
Here, we study distribution of workload and its relationship to colony size among worker ants of Temnothorax albipennis, in the context of colony emigrations. We find that one major aspect of workload, number of ...
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Article
The behaviour of ant transporters at the old and new nests during successive colony emigrations
Colonies of the ant Temnothorax albipennis improve their collective performance over successive emigrations (Langridge et al. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 56:523–529, 2004, Behav Ecol Sociobiol 62:447–456, 2008). Here, b...
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Article
Individual and collective choice: parallel prospecting and mining in ants
Decision making is of crucial importance in the lives of both animals and humans. How decisions of group members scale up to group decisions is of great interest. Accordingly, we gave homeless ant colonies (n = 6...
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How experienced individuals contribute to an improvement in collective performance in ants
Certain groups of organisms are capable of improving their collective performance with experience. In a recent study, we demonstrated that, over successive emigrations, colonies of the ant Temnothorax albipennis ...
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Article
Moving targets: collective decisions and flexible choices in house-hunting ants
Many decisions involve a trade-off between commitment and flexibility. We show here that the collective decisions ants make over new nest sites are sometimes sufficiently flexible that the ants can change tar...
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Article
Weighting waiting in collective decision-making
Animals searching for food, mates, or a home often need to decide when to stop looking and choose the best option found so far. By re-analyzing experimental data from experiments by Mallon et al. (Behav Ecol S...
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Article
A reassessment of the mating system characteristics of the army ant Eciton burchellii
In a recent study, Denny et al. (2004a) showed that queens of the army ant, Eciton burchellii, mate with multiple males and presented estimates suggesting that they mate with more males than queens of any other a...
