Socially driven negative feedback regulates activity and energy use in ant colonies

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1-2024

Abstract

Despite almost a century of research on energetics in biological systems, we still cannot explain energy regulation in social groups, like ant colonies. How do individuals regulate their collective activity without a centralized control system? What is the role of social interactions in distributing the workload amongst group members? And how does the group save energy by avoiding being constantly active? We offer new insight into these questions by studying an intuitive compartmental model, calibrated with and compared to data on ant colonies. The model describes a previously unexplored balance between positive and negative social feedback driven by individual activity: when activity levels are low, the presence of active individuals stimulates inactive individuals to start working; when activity levels are high, however, active individuals inhibit each other, effectively capping the proportion of active individuals at any one time. Through the analysis of the system stability, we demonstrate that this balance results in energetic spending at the group level growing proportionally slower than the group size. Our finding is reminiscent of Kleiber’s law of metabolic scaling in unitary organisms and highlights the critical role of social interactions in driving the collective energetic efficiency of group-living organisms.

Identifier

85210742267 (Scopus)

Publication Title

PLoS Computational Biology

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012623

e-ISSN

15537358

ISSN

1553734X

PubMed ID

39585927

Issue

11

Volume

20

Grant

2222418

Fund Ref

National Science Foundation

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