Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: Animal behavior
- Creators: Hölldobler, Bert
Description
For over a century, researchers have been investigating collective cognition, in which a group of individuals together process information and act as a single cognitive unit. However, I still know little about circumstances under which groups achieve better (or worse) decisions than individuals. My dissertation research directly addressed this longstanding question, using the house-hunting ant Temnothorax rugatulus as a model system. Here I applied concepts and methods developed in psychology not only to individuals but also to colonies in order to investigate differences of their cognitive abilities. This approach is inspired by the superorganism concept, which sees a tightly integrated insect society as the analog of a single organism. I combined experimental manipulations and models to elucidate the emergent processes of collective cognition. My studies show that groups can achieve superior cognition by sharing the burden of option assessment among members and by integrating information from members using positive feedback. However, the same positive feedback can lock the group into a suboptimal choice in certain circumstances. Although ants are obligately social, my results show that they can be isolated and individually tested on cognitive tasks. In the future, this novel approach will help the field of animal behavior move towards better understanding of collective cognition.
ContributorsSasaki, Takao (Author) / Pratt, Stephen C (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Polemnia (Committee member) / Liebig, Jürgen (Committee member) / Janssen, Marco (Committee member) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Hölldobler, Bert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The coordination of group behavior in the social insects is representative of a broader phenomenon in nature, emergent biological complexity. In such systems, it is believed that large-scale patterns result from the interaction of relatively simple subunits. This dissertation involved the study of one such system: the social foraging of the ant Temnothorax rugatulus. Physically tiny with small population sizes, these cavity-dwelling ants provide a good model system to explore the mechanisms and ultimate origins of collective behavior in insect societies. My studies showed that colonies robustly exploit sugar water. Given a choice between feeders unequal in quality, colonies allocate more foragers to the better feeder. If the feeders change in quality, colonies are able to reallocate their foragers to the new location of the better feeder. These qualities of flexibility and allocation could be explained by the nature of positive feedback (tandem run recruitment) that these ants use. By observing foraging colonies with paint-marked ants, I was able to determine the `rules' that individuals follow: foragers recruit more and give up less when they find a better food source. By altering the nutritional condition of colonies, I found that these rules are flexible - attuned to the colony state. In starved colonies, individual ants are more likely to explore and recruit to food sources than in well-fed colonies. Similar to honeybees, Temmnothorax foragers appear to modulate their exploitation and recruitment behavior in response to environmental and social cues. Finally, I explored the influence of ecology (resource distribution) on the foraging success of colonies. Larger colonies showed increased consistency and a greater rate of harvest than smaller colonies, but this advantage was mediated by the distribution of resources. While patchy or rare food sources exaggerated the relative success of large colonies, regularly (or easily found) distributions leveled the playing field for smaller colonies. Social foraging in ant societies can best be understood when we view the colony as a single organism and the phenotype - group size, communication, and individual behavior - as integrated components of a homeostatic unit.
ContributorsShaffer, Zachary (Author) / Pratt, Stephen C (Thesis advisor) / Hölldobler, Bert (Committee member) / Janssen, Marco (Committee member) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Liebig, Juergen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Social animals benefit from the aggregation of knowledge and cognitive processing power. Part of this benefit comes from individual heterogeneity, which provides the basis to group-level strategies, such as division of labor and collective intelligence. In turn, the outcomes of collective choices, as well as the needs of the society at large, influence the behavior of individuals within it. My dissertation research addresses how the feedback between individual and group-level behavior affects individuals and promotes collective change. I study this question in the context of seed selection in the seed harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex californicus. I use both field and laboratory studies to explore questions relating to individual behavior: how forager decision-making is affected through information available in the nest and at the seed pile; how workers interact with seeds in the nest; and how forager preferences diverge from each other’s and the colony’s preference. I also explore the integration between individual and colony behavior, specifically: how interactions between the foraging and processing tasks affect colony collection behavior; how individual behavior changes affect colony preference changes and whether colony preference changes can be considered learning behavior. To answer these questions, I provided colonies with binary choices between seeds of unequal or similar quality, and measured individual, task group, and colony-level behavior. I found that colonies are capable of learning to discriminate between seeds, and learned information lasts at least one month without seed interaction outside of the nest. I also found that colony learning was coordinated by foragers receiving updated information from seeds in the nest to better discriminate and make choices between seed quality during searches for seeds outside of the nest. My results show that seed processing is essential for stimulating collection of novel seeds, and that foraging and processing are conducted by behaviorally and spatially overlapping but distinct groups of workers. Finally, I found that foragers’ preferences are diverse yet flexible, even when colonies are consistent in their preference at the population level. These combined experiments generate a more detailed and complete understanding of the mechanisms behind the flexibility of collective colony choices, how colonies incorporate new information, and how workers individually and collectively make foraging decisions for the colony in a decentralized manner.
ContributorsBespalova, Ioulia Ivanovna (Author) / Fewell, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Hölldobler, Bert (Committee member) / Liebig, Jürgen (Committee member) / Pinter-Wollman, Noa (Committee member) / Pratt, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Ant colonies provide numerous opportunities to study communication systems that maintain the cohesion of eusocial groups. In many ant species, workers have retained their ovaries and the ability to produce male offspring; however, they generally refrain from producing their own sons when a fertile queen is present in the colony. Although mechanisms that facilitate the communication of the presence of a fertile queen to all members of the colony have been highly studied, those studies have often overlooked the added challenge faced by polydomous species, which divide their nests across as many as one hundred satellite nests resulting in workers potentially having infrequent contact with the queen. In these polydomous contexts, regulatory phenotypes must extend beyond the immediate spatial influence of the queen.
This work investigates mechanisms that can extend the spatial reach of fertility signaling and reproductive regulation in three polydomous ant species. In Novomessor cockerelli, the presence of larvae but not eggs is shown to inhibit worker reproduction. Then, in Camponotus floridanus, 3-methylheptacosane found on the queen cuticle and queen-laid eggs is verified as a releaser pheromone sufficient to disrupt normally occurring aggressive behavior toward foreign workers. Finally, the volatile and cuticular hydrocarbon pheromones present on the cuticle of Oecophylla smaragdina queens are shown to release strong attraction response by workers; when coupled with previous work, this result suggests that these chemicals may underly both the formation of a worker retinue around the queen as well as egg-located mechanisms of reproductive regulation in distant satellite nests. Whereas most previous studies have focused on the short-range role of hydrocarbons on the cuticle of the queen, these studies demonstrate that eusocial insects may employ longer range regulatory mechanisms. Both queen volatiles and distributed brood can extend the range of queen fertility signaling, and the use of larvae for fertility signaling suggest that feeding itself may be a non-chemical mechanism for reproductive regulation. Although trail laying in mass-recruiting ants is often used as an example of complex communication, reproductive regulation in ants may be a similarly complex example of insect communication, especially in the case of large, polydomous ant colonies.
This work investigates mechanisms that can extend the spatial reach of fertility signaling and reproductive regulation in three polydomous ant species. In Novomessor cockerelli, the presence of larvae but not eggs is shown to inhibit worker reproduction. Then, in Camponotus floridanus, 3-methylheptacosane found on the queen cuticle and queen-laid eggs is verified as a releaser pheromone sufficient to disrupt normally occurring aggressive behavior toward foreign workers. Finally, the volatile and cuticular hydrocarbon pheromones present on the cuticle of Oecophylla smaragdina queens are shown to release strong attraction response by workers; when coupled with previous work, this result suggests that these chemicals may underly both the formation of a worker retinue around the queen as well as egg-located mechanisms of reproductive regulation in distant satellite nests. Whereas most previous studies have focused on the short-range role of hydrocarbons on the cuticle of the queen, these studies demonstrate that eusocial insects may employ longer range regulatory mechanisms. Both queen volatiles and distributed brood can extend the range of queen fertility signaling, and the use of larvae for fertility signaling suggest that feeding itself may be a non-chemical mechanism for reproductive regulation. Although trail laying in mass-recruiting ants is often used as an example of complex communication, reproductive regulation in ants may be a similarly complex example of insect communication, especially in the case of large, polydomous ant colonies.
ContributorsEbie, Jessica (Author) / Liebig, Jürgen (Thesis advisor) / Hölldobler, Bert (Thesis advisor) / Pratt, Stephen (Committee member) / Smith, Brian (Committee member) / Rutowski, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Social behavior embodies a central tenet of biology yet social interactions remain fairly undocumented for marine turtles. Marine turtles have been studied extensively yet the importance and prevalence of social behaviors has largely been overlooked within the taxon as a whole. Through this project, new evidence suggests that marine turtles, specifically Hawksbills, may not be as solitary as initially believed yet display a variety of social behaviors. These behaviors suggest that more complex social behaviors exist throughout the taxon and marine turtles may be more social than initially believed. These findings have important conservation management implications and encourages more research into turtle behavior.
ContributorsJohnson, Corinne Eva (Author) / Senko, Jesse (Thesis director) / Gaos, Alexander (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12