With a little help from my friends: Individual and collaborative performance during trail clearing in leaf‐cutting ants

Abstract

Social organisms express collaborative behaviors, allowing them to solve problems that exceed their individual capabilities. Group coordination and environmental context are some of the factors that may determine the performance of individual and collaborative strategies. Using the trail‐clearing behavior of leaf‐cutting ants, we evaluated experimentally for both strategies whether the success probability and clearing time depend on problem characteristics and context. We placed obstacles of different sizes and shapes (problem characteristics), in trails with different foragers' fluxes and soil roughness (context) in 10 field nests of Atta cephalotes, and compared removal success (i.e., if ants could remove obstacles) and time of individual and collaborative strategies. Very large obstacles could only be removed collaboratively, confirming individual limitations for transporting large objects. For all obstacle shapes, collaborative removals were more successful but took longer, suggesting that coordination among individuals delays these actions. Individual strategies were faster, regardless of ant flux. However, as ant flux increased, removal success was higher for collaborative than for individual removals. Lastly, trail roughness had no effect. This work highlights one advantage of sociality, the option of collaboratively solving problems that exceed the individual abilities. In addition, it reveals the associated costs of joint actions, since they can be time‐consuming presumably due to coordination problems. Abstract in Spanish is available with online material.

Como lidiar con las desventajas de vivir en sociedades densas: reglas de tránsito en hormigas cortadoras de hojas

“…Diversos estudios demuestran cómo las HCH poseen comportamientos que reducen los choques y las demoras en los senderos. Por ejemplo, las hormigas sin carga remueven obstáculos en el sendero (Alma et al 2020), inclusive aquellos obstáculos a alturas que no representan un problema para ellas, pero lo serán para las hormigas cargadas que regresan al nido (Bruce et al 2017).…”

Ants as geomorphological agents: A global assessment

“…Individual ants can carry objects much greater than their own body weight (Andrews 1932), but even more significantly, and rarely in the animal world where only ants and humans seem to have this ability, they are capable of cooperative transport (i.e. they work together to move objects) (Czaczkes and Ratnieks 2013;Feinerman et al 2018;Alma et al 2020). Their efforts are matched by their numbers, for up to 10 15 ants are estimated to live on Earth (Whitchurch 2014).…”