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

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-14-2024

Abstract

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. Unlike humans, ants cannot use verbal communication but most likely rely on private information and/or mechanical forces sensed through the carried item to coordinate their behaviour. Here, we investigated how groups of weaver ants achieve consensus during cooperative transport using a tethered-object protocol, where ants had to transport a prey item that was tethered in place with a thin string. This protocol allows the decoupling of the movement of informed ants from that of uninformed individuals. We showed that weaver ants pool together the opinions of all group members to increase their navigational accuracy. We confirmed this result using a symmetry-breaking task, in which we challenged ants with navigating an open-ended corridor. Weaver ants are the first reported ant species to use a 'wisdom-of-the-crowd' strategy for cooperative transport, demonstrating that consensus mechanisms may differ according to the ecology of each species.

Identifier

85201251132 (Scopus)

Publication Title

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.2367

e-ISSN

14712954

ISSN

09628452

PubMed ID

39140325

Issue

2028

Volume

291

Grant

1955210

Fund Ref

European Commission

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