Ants’ Personality and Its Dependence on Foraging Styles: Research Perspectives

Abstract

The paper is devoted to analyzing consistent individual differences in behavior, also known as “personalities,” in the context of a vital ant task—the detection and transportation of food. I am trying to elucidate the extent to which collective cognition is individual-based and whether a single individual’s actions can suffice to direct the entire colony or colony units. The review analyzes personalities in various insects with different life cycles and provides new insights into the role of individuals in directing group actions in ants. Although it is widely accepted that, in eusocial insects, colony personality emerges from the workers’ personalities, there are only a few examples of investigations of personality at the individual level. The central question of the review is how the distribution of behavioral types and cognitive responsibilities within ant colonies depends on a species’ foraging style. In the context of how workers’ behavioral traits display during foraging, a crucial question is what makes an ant a scout that discovers a new food source and mobilizes its nestmates. In mass recruiting, tandem-running, and even in group-recruiting species displaying leadership, the division of labor between scouts and recruits appears to be ephemeral. There is only little, if any, evidence of ants’ careers and behavioral consistency as leaders. Personal traits characterize groups of individuals at the colony level but not performers of functional roles during foraging. The leader-scouting seems to be the only known system that is based on a consistent personal difference between scouting and foraging individuals.

Information Theory Opens New Dimensions in Experimental Studies of Animal Behaviour and Communication

“…Since task fidelity is weak in all these species, there is still no evidence of individual differences between leaders and followers [ 120 ]. Even in group-recruiting species, with their targeted communication between recruiters and recruited nestmates, there is only slight, if any, evidence of ants’ careers and behavioural consistency as leaders (for details, see [ 121 ]). Personal traits characterise groups of individuals at the colony level, but not performers of functional roles during group-recruiting foraging.…”

“…Red wood ants’ abilities to encode sequences of turns along their way to a goal [ 72 , 107 ] can be considered a cognitive adaptation to their particular foraging style within the tree crown. The leader-scouting seems to be the only foraging system based on consistent personal differences between scouting and foraging individuals [ 72 , 121 , 122 ], resembling in some traits the “star” network model described by Sueur et al [ 117 ].…”

Dynamics, statistics, and task allocation of foraging ants

“…They exhibit what is known as collective behavior where individual ants following simple behavioral rules based on local interactions result in an organized and complex collective motion at the population level [9,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. The complexity of the ant society derives from the level of local interactions between individual ants, and generally, the larger the colony size, the more advanced are the social traits [1,[44][45][46][47]. In small and more "primitive" ant societies (population size 10 1 N 10 4 ), foraging tends to be solitary and rely on a slow, individual recruitment, i.e., tandem running, where a recruiter interacts directly with one or a few individuals [48][49][50][51].…”

“…Between these two limits, one finds the different types of recruitment such as leader scouting, group recruitment, etc. The transition from tandem running to mass recruitment is characterized by an increasing number of nest mates that react to the recruiters' signals and is highly correlated with an increase in colony size [46,47].…”