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Bob Planqué
| Speaker: |
Dr. Bob Planqué
(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
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| Date: |
Wednesday September 27, 2006 |
| Title: |
It
takes two to tango - flexible house hunting strategies in social insects
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Abstract
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The study of decentralized decision making in
social insects and other groups of social animals has revealed a number
of prominent mechanisms such as positive feedback, inhibition of
behaviours and response thresholds. One of the prime examples in which
many of these behaviours are employed to form collective decisions is
house hunting by colonies of ants. When their old nest is destroyed,
scouts go looking for potential new nests, recruit other ants to these
nests through a process called tandem-running, and switch from
recruitment to carrying by monitoring if a quorum of ants has been
reached inside a new nest. Using these different behaviours allows the
ants to efficiently trade speed for accuracy when deciding which nest
to emigrate to. One of the behaviours commonly observed during colony
emigrations has sparked much speculation, and does not fit the above
emigration paradigm: reverse tandem running from the new to the old
nest.
Although ants are usually regarded as simple automatons obeying innate
rules, close scrutiny reveals that they are capable of rich individual
behaviour, including learning and even teaching others. In this talk I
will highlight the challenges to model such behaviour in order to
understand collective decision making in these ants. Then, using a
number of models, we will explore different hypotheses that might
explain the role of reverse tandem running.
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