Ant traffic rules

Abstract

SummaryMany animals take part in flow-like collective movements. In most species, however, the flow is unidirectional. Ants are one of the rare group of organisms in which flow-like movements are predominantly bidirectional. This adds to the difficulty of the task of maintaining a smooth, efficient movement. Yet, ants seem to fare well at this task. Do they really? And if so, how do such simple organisms succeed in maintaining a smooth traffic flow, when even humans experience trouble with this task? How does traffic in ants compare with that in human pedestrians or vehicles? The experimental study of ant traffic is only a few years old but it has already provided interesting insights into traffic organization and regulation in animals, showing in particular that an ant colony as a whole can be considered as a typical self-organized adaptive system. In this review we will show that the study of ant traffic can not only uncover basic principles of behavioral ecology and evolution in social insects but also provide new insights into the study of traffic systems in general.

Efficient Egress of Escaping Ants Stressed with Temperature

“…Ants and honeybees are useful biological models for studying collective decision-making processes in group-living animals. These insect societies, even when composed of thousands of individuals, behave coordinately as a whole [23,24]. As ants used in the mentioned experiments are of the same colony, they should be expected to act more cooperatively than pedestrians in danger.…”

Leaf-cutting ants as road engineers: the width of trails at branching points in Atta cephalotes

“…Leaf-cutting ant trails provide a good model system for studying the value of extended phenotypes, because they play an essential role in resource acquisition and information transfer, are easy to measure, and feasible to manipulate (Burd et al, 2002, Fourcassié et al, 2010. Here, we used a simple engineering principle, which proposes that the width of road necessary for a smooth traffic flow is proportional to the peak traffic volume, to analyze the adaptive significance of the trail width at branching points in the leaf-cutting ant A. cephalotes.…”

“…This suggests that nest structures function as an extension of the colony phenotype itself (Turner, 2000). However, there are relatively few studies that have analyzed the trunk trail system as extended phenotypes of the ant colony (Burd et al, 2002;Burd, 2006;Fourcassié et al, 2010). Here, we employ some simple ideas from traffic engineering to analyze the width of trails at branching points and discuss their adaptive significance in the leaf-cutting ant Atta cephalotes.…”

Effects of worker size on the dynamics of fire ant tunnel construction

“…However, traffic and overcrowding at the tunnelling site may also be important in determining the number of workers that participate in digging. Studies of worker flow on foraging trails [50][51][52] and within artificial nests have shown that traffic dynamics are important in organizing worker movement [53] and determining tunnel size and branch locations [54,55]. Furthermore, the diameters of foraging tunnels in S. invicta nests in Nature decrease away from the nest, which may reflect a decrease in worker traffic at these distances [41].…”