Improvement in collective performance with experience in ants

By Elizabeth A. Langridge, Nigel R. Franks, Ana B. Sendova-Franks. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2004

93 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that entire ant colonies can improve their collective performance progressively when they repeat the same process. Colonies of Leptothorax albipennis can reduce their total emigration times over successive emigrations. We show that this improvement is based on experience and some memory-like process, rather than a coincidental developmental change or an increased general level of arousal. We demonstrate that the benefits of experience can be lost (i.e. forgotten) if the interval between successive emigrations is too long. We also show that the benefits of experience are more likely to be retained over a longer period if the collective performance has been repeated several times. This is a new demonstration of a process akin to learning in ants and we briefly discuss how it may involve not only improvements in individual performance but also improvements in the ways in which the ants interact with one another.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/07fed65c7df155e9b3bee1ca672e31f8c5fcb03e

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Citations in the corpus

Why do not all workers work? Colony size and workload during emigrations in the ant Temnothorax albipennis (2008, background): “Learning has been shown to influence emigration efficiency in these ants (Langridge et al. 2004, 2008a, b) and potentially to have a larger effect in small colonies (Dornhaus and Franks 2006).”
Schooling and learning: early social environment predicts social learning ability in the guppy, Poecilia reticulata (2008, background): “Social learning has been documented in a variety of taxa (colonial insects: Langridge et al. 2004; noncolonial insects: Coolen et al. 2005; fish: Vilhunen et al. 2005; birds: Johanessen et al. 2006; mammals: Cook & Mineka 1989) and in a number of different contexts (foraging: Laland & Williams…”
Behavioral mechanisms of collective nest-site choice by the ant Temnothorax curvispinosus (2005, background): “In T. albipennis, colonies emigrate faster when induced to move within seven days of a previous emigration, an effect which plausibly involves changes in recruitment initiation rate (Langridge et al., 2004).”