Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans.

Biological ensembles use collective intelligence to tackle challenges together, but suboptimal coordination can undermine the effectiveness of group cognition. Testing whether collective cognition exceeds that of the individual is often impractical since different organizational scales tend to face disjoint problems. One exception is the problem of navigating large loads through complex environments and toward a given target.

Synergy as the Failure of Distributivity.

The concept of emergence, or synergy in its simplest form, is widely used but lacks a rigorous definition. Our work connects information and set theory to uncover the mathematical nature of synergy as the failure of distributivity. For the trivial case of discrete random variables, we explore whether and how it is possible to get more information out of lesser parts.

Leaderless consensus decision-making determines cooperative transport direction in weaver ants.

Animal groups need to achieve and maintain consensus to minimize conflict among individuals and prevent group fragmentation. An excellent example of a consensus challenge is cooperative transport, where multiple individuals cooperate to move a large item together. This behaviour, regularly displayed by ants and humans only, requires individuals to agree on which direction to move in.

High mirror symmetry in mouse exploratory behavior.

The physicality of the world in which the animal acts-its anatomical structure, physiology, perception, emotional states, and cognitive capabilities-determines the boundaries of the behavioral space within which the animal can operate. Behavior, therefore, can be considered as the subspace that remains after secluding all actions that are not available to the animal due to constraints. The very signature of being a certain creature is reflected in these limitations that shape its behavior.

Animal Behavior: Drosophila melanogaster Goes Social.

A new study relates the properties of Drosophila melanogaster social networks to group composition and demonstrates how they may be altered using behavioral priming and genetic manipulations.

Ant collective cognition allows for efficient navigation through disordered environments.

The cognitive abilities of biological organisms only make sense in the context of their environment. Here, we study longhorn crazy ant collective navigation skills within the context of a semi-natural, randomized environment. Mapping this biological setting into the 'Ant-in-a-Labyrinth' framework which studies physical transport through disordered media allows us to formulate precise links between the statistics of environmental challenges and the ants' collective navigation abilities.

Colony entropy-Allocation of goods in ant colonies.

Allocation of goods is a key feature in defining the connection between the individual and the collective scale in any society. Both the process by which goods are to be distributed, and the resulting allocation to the members of the society may affect the success of the population as a whole. One of the most striking natural examples of a highly successful cooperative society is the ant colony which often acts as a single superorganism.

Ants Use Multiple Spatial Memories and Chemical Pointers to Navigate Their Nest.

Animal navigation relies on the available environmental cues and, where present, visual cues typically dominate. While much is known about vision-assisted navigation, knowledge of navigation in the dark is scarce. Here, we combine individual tracking, dynamic modular nest structures, and spatially resolved chemical profiling to study how Camponotus fellah ants navigate within the dark labyrinth of their nest.

Limits on reliable information flows through stochastic populations.

Biological systems can share and collectively process information to yield emergent effects, despite inherent noise in communication. While man-made systems often employ intricate structural solutions to overcome noise, the structure of many biological systems is more amorphous. It is not well understood how communication noise may affect the computational repertoire of such groups.

Bi-stability in cooperative transport by ants in the presence of obstacles.

To cooperatively carry large food items to the nest, individual ants conform their efforts and coordinate their motion. Throughout this expedition, collective motion is driven both by internal interactions between the carrying ants and a response to newly arrived informed ants that orient the cargo towards the nest. During the transport process, the carrying group must overcome obstacles that block their path to the nest.

Individual crop loads provide local control for collective food intake in ant colonies.

Nutritional regulation by ants emerges from a distributed process: food is collected by a small fraction of workers, stored within the crops of individuals, and spread via local ant-to-ant interactions. The precise individual-level underpinnings of this collective regulation have remained unclear mainly due to difficulties in measuring food within ants' crops. Here we image fluorescent liquid food in individually tagged ants and track the real-time food flow from foragers to their gradually satiating colonies.

Ants regulate colony spatial organization using multiple chemical road-signs.

Communication provides the basis for social life. In ant colonies, the prevalence of local, often chemically mediated, interactions introduces strong links between communication networks and the spatial distribution of ants. It is, however, unknown how ants identify and maintain nest chambers with distinct functions.

Individual versus collective cognition in social insects.

The concerted responses of eusocial insects to environmental stimuli are often referred to as collective cognition at the level of the colony. To achieve collective cognition, a group can draw on two different sources: individual cognition and the connectivity between individuals. Computation in neural networks, for example, is attributed more to sophisticated communication schemes than to the complexity of individual neurons.

Emergent oscillations assist obstacle negotiation during ant cooperative transport.

Collective motion by animal groups is affected by internal interactions, external constraints, and the influx of information. A quantitative understanding of how these different factors give rise to different modes of collective motion is, at present, lacking. Here, we study how ants that cooperatively transport a large food item react to an obstacle blocking their path.

A locally-blazed ant trail achieves efficient collective navigation despite limited information.

Any organism faces sensory and cognitive limitations which may result in maladaptive decisions. Such limitations are prominent in the context of groups where the relevant information at the individual level may not coincide with collective requirements. Here, we study the navigational decisions exhibited by ants as they cooperatively transport a large food item.

Ant trophallactic networks: simultaneous measurement of interaction patterns and food dissemination.

Eusocial societies and ants, in particular, maintain tight nutritional regulation at both individual and collective levels. The mechanisms that underlie this control are far from trivial since, in these distributed systems, information about the global supply and demand is not available to any single individual. Here we present a novel technique for non-intervening frequent measurement of the food load of all individuals in an ant colony, including during trophallactic events in which food is transferred by mouth-to-mouth feeding.

Ant groups optimally amplify the effect of transiently informed individuals.

To cooperatively transport a large load, it is important that carriers conform in their efforts and align their forces. A downside of behavioural conformism is that it may decrease the group's responsiveness to external information. Combining experiment and theory, we show how ants optimize collective transport.

Confidence sharing: an economic strategy for efficient information flows in animal groups.

Social animals may share information to obtain a more complete and accurate picture of their surroundings. However, physical constraints on communication limit the flow of information between interacting individuals in a way that can cause an accumulation of errors and deteriorated collective behaviors. Here, we theoretically study a general model of information sharing within animal groups.

How collective comparisons emerge without individual comparisons of the options.

Collective decisions in animal groups emerge from the actions of individuals who are unlikely to have global information. Comparative assessment of options can be valuable in decision-making. Ant colonies are excellent collective decision-makers, for example when selecting a new nest-site.

Automated long-term tracking and social behavioural phenotyping of animal colonies within a semi-natural environment.

Social behaviour has a key role in animal survival across species, ranging from insects to primates and humans. However, the biological mechanisms driving natural interactions between multiple animals, over long-term periods, are poorly studied and remain elusive. Rigorous and objective quantification of behavioural parameters within a group poses a major challenge as it requires simultaneous monitoring of the positions of several individuals and comprehensive consideration of many complex factors.

Desert ants achieve reliable recruitment across noisy interactions.

We study how desert ants, Cataglyphis niger, a species that lacks pheromone-based recruitment mechanisms, inform each other about the presence of food. Our results are based on automated tracking that allows us to collect a large database of ant trajectories and interactions. We find that interactions affect an ant's speed within the nest.

Experience, corpulence and decision making in ant foraging.

Social groups are structured by the decisions of their members. Social insects typically divide labour: some decide to stay in the nest while others forage for the colony. Two sources of information individuals may use when deciding whether to forage are their own experience of recent task performance and their own physiology, e.

Single-cell quantification of IL-2 response by effector and regulatory T cells reveals critical plasticity in immune response.

Understanding how the immune system decides between tolerance and activation by antigens requires addressing cytokine regulation as a highly dynamic process. We quantified the dynamics of interleukin-2 (IL-2) signaling in a population of T cells during an immune response by combining in silico modeling and single-cell measurements in vitro. We demonstrate that IL-2 receptor expression levels vary widely among T cells creating a large variability in the ability of the individual cells to consume, produce and participate in IL-2 signaling within the population.