0000000000341955
AUTHOR
Nigel R. Franks
Why do house-hunting ants recruit in both directions?
8 pages; International audience; To perform tasks, organisms often use multiple procedures. Explaining the breadth of such behavioural repertoires is not always straightforward. During house hunting, colonies of Temnothorax albipennis ants use a range of behaviours to organise their emigrations. In particular, the ants use tandem running to recruit na? ants to potential nest sites. Initially, they use forward tandem runs (FTRs) in which one leader takes a single follower along the route from the old nest to the new one. Later, they use reverse tandem runs (RTRs) in the opposite direction. Tandem runs are used to teach active ants the route between the nests, so that they can be involved qui…
The dawn of a golden age in mathematical insect sociobiology
23 pages; It is bold. It is also arguably overly grand and it may be illusory. History alone will judge if this is the dawn of a golden age in mathematical sociobiology. To be sure, mathematical biology has already seen a number of false dawns. It may appear, for example, that both catastrophe theory and chaos theory each have enjoyed almost all of their 15 minutes of fame. However, it is right and proper that a wave of initial excitement, or indeed, hyperbole, is followed by slower and steadier progress as a field matures. So what justifies our unbridled optimism? The first answer is demonstrable progress. Self-organization theory and complex systems theory coupled with pioneering experime…
Simple learning rules to cope with changing environments
10 pages; International audience; We consider an agent that must choose repeatedly among several actions. Each action has a certain probability of giving the agent an energy reward, and costs may be associated with switching between actions. The agent does not know which action has the highest reward probability, and the probabilities change randomly over time. We study two learning rules that have been widely used to model decision-making processes in animals-one deterministic and the other stochastic. In particular, we examine the influence of the rules' 'learning rate' on the agent's energy gain. We compare the performance of each rule with the best performance attainable when the agent …