School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University , New South Wales 2109, Australia.
Department of Biological Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology , Newark, NJ, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2024 Aug;291(2028):20232367. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2023.2367. Epub 2024 Aug 14.
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.
动物群体需要达成并维持共识，以最大限度地减少个体之间的冲突并防止群体分裂。一个很好的共识挑战的例子是合作运输，多个个体合作一起移动一个大物品。这种行为，经常被蚂蚁和人类表现出来，要求个体就移动的方向达成一致。与人类不同，蚂蚁不能使用口头交流，但很可能依赖于通过携带的物品感知到的私人信息和/或机械力来协调它们的行为。在这里，我们使用系绳物体协议研究了织工蚁在合作运输期间如何达成共识，在该协议中，蚂蚁必须运输一个用细绳子系在原地的猎物。该协议允许将知情蚂蚁的运动与不知情个体的运动分离开来。我们表明，织工蚁将所有成员的意见汇集在一起，以提高其导航准确性。我们使用打破对称性的任务验证了这一结果，在该任务中，我们挑战蚂蚁在没有尽头的走廊中导航。织工蚁是第一个被报道的使用“群众智慧”策略进行合作运输的蚂蚁物种，这表明共识机制可能因每个物种的生态而异。
