Event overview
Dr. Elva Robinson of the Univeristy of York will present a lecture on her work exploring collective decision making through studying radio tagged ants.
Ant colonies are model systems for the study of self-organisation and viewing ants as identical agents following simple rules has led to many insights into the emergence of complex behaviours. However, real biological ants are far from identical in behaviour. New advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology now allow the exploration of ant behaviour at the individual level, providing unprecedented insights into distributed decision-making. Elva has addressed two areas of decision-making with this new technology: 1 Collective decision-making during colony emigration; 2 Task decisions in a changing environment. The first of these, collective decision-making during colony emigration, uses RFID microtransponder tags to identify the ants involved in collecting information about the environment, and to determine how their actions lead to the final colony-level decision. Elva's results demonstrate that ants could use a very simple threshold rule to make their individual decisions, and still maintain a sophisticated choice mechanism at the colony level. The second area of distributed decision-making which has benefitted from the use of RFID is ant colony task-allocation, and in particular, how tasks are robustly distributed between members of a colony in the face of changing environmental conditions. The use of RFID tags on worker ants allows simultaneous monitoring of a range of factors which could affect decision-making, including age, experience, spatial location, social interactions and fat reserves. Elva's results demonstrate that individual ants base some task decisions on their own physiological state, but also utilise social cues. For non-specialist tasks, self-organisation also contributes, as movement patterns can cause emergent task allocation. The combination of these simple mechanisms provides the colony as a whole with a responsive work-force, appropriately allocated across tasks, but flexible in response to changing environmental conditions.
York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 30 Jan 2013 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
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