Consensus driven by a minority in heterogenous groups of the cockroach Periplaneta americana

Martín, Mariano Calvo; Eeckhout, Max; Deneubourg, Jean‐Louis; Nicolis, Stamatios C.

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2021.102723

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 93 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This suggests that individual memory or interindividual behaviours (e.g. idiosyncrasy) [ 62 , 63 ] are negligible in our experiment. For the groups, the number of individuals in the RG shelter at the end of the trials and at 600 minutes are significantly correlated (Spearman test: ρ = 0.58, P = 0.005, Fig 6 ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergence and retention of a collective memory in cockroaches

Calvo Martín,

Rodriguez Palacio,

Deneubourg

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The stability of collective decisions-making in social systems is crucial as it can lead to counterintuitive phenomena such as collective memories, where an initial choice is challenged by environmental changes. Many social species face the challenge to perform collective decisions under variable conditions. In this study, we focused on situations where isolated individuals and groups of the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) had to choose between two shelters with different luminosities that were inverted during the experiment. The darker shelter was initially preferred, but only groups that reached a consensus within that shelter maintain their choice after the light inversion, while isolated individuals and small groups lacked site fidelity. Our mathematical model, incorporating deterministic and probabilistic elements, sheds light on the significance interactions and their stochasticity in the emergence and retention of a collective memory.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergence and retention of a collective memory in cockroaches

Calvo Martín,

Rodriguez Palacio,

Deneubourg

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, the consequences of heterospecific aggregation on decision processes are mostly unknown [1,16,50]. Here, tiny variations in the balance of larval cues may have changed final aggregation outputs, leading to various unstable configurations [18,49,51,52]. Further, each individual larva may have slightly different life-history traits, physiological requirements [10,40] and even personality [47], resulting in different choices.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aggregation in an heterospecific population of blowfly larvae: social behaviour is impacted by species-specific thermal requirements and settlement order

Charabidzé

Aubernon

2023

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Larvae of several blowfly species grow on carcasses and actively aggregate together. They face harsh developmental conditions resulting in a strong pressure to reduce development time: this is achieved either through thermoregulation or aggregation. We investigate how these two developmental strategies are modulated within heterospecific groups. In a first experiment, larvae of two species with different thermal requirements were deposited simultaneously on a thermal gradient. This resulted in the formation of two monospecific groups, each located at the species-specific thermal preferendum. However, when Calliphora vomitoria (Linnaeus) larvae were placed first, the later arriving Lucilia sericata (Meigen) larvae attracted the whole group to its own thermal preferendum. In the reverse experiment, half of the replicates resulted in single dense heterospecific groups observed at temperatures ranging from C. vomitoria to L. sericata preferendum. The other half of the replicates resulted in loose groups spread out on the thermal gradient. These results highlight the emergence of collective decisions ranging from thermal optimization to heterospecific aggregation at suboptimal temperatures. They demonstrate that species settlement order strongly affects self-organization processes and mixed-species group formation. We conclude that thermal optimization and heterospecific niche construction are two developmental strategies of carrion fly larvae. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Mixed-species groups and aggregations: shaping ecological and behavioural patterns and processes’.

show abstract

“…The study shows that the accuracy of the group motion towards the direction known by the informed agents increases asymptotically as the proportion of informed individuals increases, and that the larger the group, the smaller the proportion of informed individuals needed to guide the group with a given accuracy. A recent study on cockroaches [3] has shown that a minority of individuals preferring one shelter over the other can influence the population to reach a consensus for only one site. The technique of using informed individuals to steer the collective dynamics has already been used in artificial systems with various types of collective behaviours.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Controlling Robot Swarm Aggregation through a Minority of Informed Robots

Sion¹,

Reina²,

Birattari³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Self-organised aggregation is a well studied behaviour in swarm robotics as it is the pre-condition for the development of more advanced group-level responses. In this paper, we investigate the design of decentralised algorithms for a swarm of heterogeneous robots that self-aggregate over distinct target sites. A previous study has shown that including as part of the swarm a number of informed robots can steer the dynamic of the aggregation process to a desirable distribution of the swarm between the available aggregation sites. We have replicated the results of the previous study using a simplified approach, we removed constraints related to the communication protocol of the robots and simplified the control mechanisms regulating the transitions between states of the probabilistic controller. The results show that the performances obtained with the previous, more complex, controller can be replicated with our simplified approach which offers clear advantages in terms of portability to the physical robots and in terms of flexibility. That is, our simplified approach can generate self-organised aggregation responses in a larger set of operating conditions than what can be achieved with the complex controller.

show abstract

Consensus driven by a minority in heterogenous groups of the cockroach Periplaneta americana

Cited by 8 publications

References 93 publications

Emergence and retention of a collective memory in cockroaches

Emergence and retention of a collective memory in cockroaches

Aggregation in an heterospecific population of blowfly larvae: social behaviour is impacted by species-specific thermal requirements and settlement order

Controlling Robot Swarm Aggregation through a Minority of Informed Robots

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About