Chapter 3: Information Transfer
Picture by Duncan Jackson
A key benefit of being near to others is access to information. Animals often live in environments where resources are distributed in patches which exist only temporarily. In such an environment, a single individual has a very low rate of finding food if they search independently. When large numbers of individuals search at the same time, however, the probability that one of them finds some food is considerably larger. If individuals are able to monitor and use the discoveries of others in their own search, they can increase their own rate of finding food. Underlying all information transfer is some form of positive feedback: one individual finds food, a second moves towards it and then still a third moves towards the second and so on. This chapter uses a couple of simple mathematical models of positive feedback that provide a reference point for different forms information transfer. These models help us classify information transfer seen across species not only in terms of the mechanistic similarities and differences, but also in terms of how it has evolved.
Key ideas covered in this chapter: Information centres; positive feedback; ant pheromone trails; symmetry breaking and bifurcations;honey bee foraging;cue vs signal based recruitment;foraging success and group size; synergy;social parasitism; the producer scrounger game;quorum responses;gaze following in humans; social conformity; cultural evolution.
Links
Jean-Louis Deneubourg’s homepage
Luc-Alain Giraldeau's homepage
Madeleine Beekman's homepage
References
Barnard, C. J. & Sibly, R. M. 1981 Producers And Scroungers - A General-Model And Its Application To Captive Flocks Of House Sparrows. Animal Behaviour 29, 543-550.
Beckers, R., Deneubourg, J. L. & Goss, S. 1992b Trails and U-Turns in the Selection of a Path by the Ant Lasius-Niger. Journal of Theoretical Biology 159, 397-415.
Beekman, M., Sumpter, D. J. T. & Ratnieks, F. L. W. 2001 Phase transition between disordered and ordered foraging in Pharaoh's ants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 98, 9703-9706.
Bonabeau, E., Theraulaz, G., Deneubourg, J. L., Aron, S. & Camazine, S. 1997 Self-organization in social insects. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 12, 188-193.
Brown, C. R. 1986 Cliff Swallow Colonies As Information-Centers. Science 234, 83-85.
Camazine, S., Deneubourg, J. L., Franks, N. R., Sneyd, J., Theraulaz, G. & Bonabeau, E. 2001 Self-organization in biological systems. Princeton studies in complexity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Collins, L. M. & Sumpter, D. J. T. 2007 The feeding dynamics of broiler chickens. Journal of the Royal Society Interface 4, 65-72.
Nicolis, S. C. & Deneubourg, J. L. 1999 Emerging patterns and food recruitment in ants: an analytical study. Journal of Theoretical Biology 198, 575-592.
Giraldeau, L. A. & Beauchamp, G. 1999 Food exploitation: searching for the optimal joining policy. Trends In Ecology & Evolution 14, 102-106.
Portha, S., Deneubourg, J. L. & Detrain, C. 2002 Self-organized asymmetries in ant foraging: a functional response to food type and colony needs. Behavioral Ecology 13, 776-781.
Seeley, T. D. 1997 Honey bee colonies are group-level adaptive units. American Naturalist 150, S22-S41.
Sumpter, D. J. T. & Beekman, M. 2003 From nonlinearity to optimality: pheromone trail foraging by ants. Animal Behaviour 66, 273-280.
Sumpter, D. J. T. & Pratt, S. C. 2003 A modelling framework for understanding social insect foraging. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 53, 131-144.
Back to Top
-----------------------
|
