Behavioral responses to colony-level properties affect disturbance resistance of red harvester ant colonies

• 早川, 智洋

  Mechatronics-Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Science, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University

• 土畑, 重人

  Laboratory of Insect Ecology, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University

• 松野, 文俊

  Mechatronics-Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Science, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University

抄録

Self-organizing biological systems, such as colonies of social insects, are characterized by their decentralized control and flexible responses to changing environments, often likened to swarm intelligence. Although decentralized control is well known to be a product of local interactions among agents, without the need for a bird’s-eye view, indirect knowledge of properties that indicate the current states of the entire system also helps each agent to respond to changes, thereby leading to a more adaptive system. In this study, we analyze the rules that govern workers’ behavioral responses to colony-level properties and assess whether they contribute to adaptive flexibility in social insect colonies. We focus on task allocation among red harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) as a model system and develop an ordinary differential equation model to describe the system of task allocation among workers. We simulate 12 scenarios specifying how workers respond to changes in the colony-level properties of colony size and nutritional state. We found that when workers decrease their contact rates in response to increasing colony size, they enable achievement of a larger colony size, similar to that of P. barbatus colonies in nature, and when workers increase their foraging levels in response to decreasing colony-wide nutritional levels, they increase resilience to environmental disturbances. These negative feedback rules governing the response to colony-level properties are consistent with previous reports on ants and honeybees.

収録刊行物

• Journal of Theoretical Biology

  Journal of Theoretical Biology 492 110186-, 2020-05-07

  Elsevier BV

キーワード

• Self-regulation
• Adaptive behavior
• Task allocation
• ODE model
• Pogonomyrmex barbatus

詳細情報

• CRID: 1050565162987673472
• NII論文ID: 120006817610
• ISSN: 00225193
• ISSN: 10958541
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2020.110186
• HANDLE: 2433/246577
• Web Site: https://api.elsevier.com/content/article/PII:S0022519320300424?httpAccept=text/xml
• Web Site: https://api.elsevier.com/content/article/PII:S0022519320300424?httpAccept=text/plain
• 本文言語コード: en
• 資料種別: journal article
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