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Ant colonies regulate foraging in response to their collective hunger, yet the mechanism behind this distributed regulation remains unclear. Previously, by imaging food flow within ant colonies we showed that the frequency of foraging events declines linearly with colony satiation (Greenwald et al., 2018). Our analysis implied that as a forager distributes food in the nest, two factors affect her decision to exit for another foraging trip: her current food load and its rate of change. Sensing these variables can be attributed to the forager’s individual cognitive ability. Here, new analyses of the foragers’ trajectories within the nest imply a different way to achieve the observed regulation. Instead of an explicit decision to exit, foragers merely tend toward the depth of the nest when their food load is high and toward the nest exit when it is low. Thus, the colony shapes the forager’s trajectory by controlling her unloading rate, while she senses only her current food load. Using an agent-based model and mathematical analysis, we show that this simple mechanism robustly yields emergent regulation of foraging frequency. These findings demonstrate how the embedding of individuals in physical space can reduce their cognitive demands without compromising their computational role in the group.

The cognitive abilities of biological organisms only make sense in the context of their environment. Here, we study longhorn crazy ant collective navigation skills within the context of a semi-natural, randomized environment. Mapping this biological setting into the ‘Ant-in-a-Labyrinth’ framework which studies physical transport through disordered media allows us to formulate precise links between the statistics of environmental challenges and the ants’ collective navigation abilities. We show that, in this environment, the ants use their numbers to collectively extend their sensing range. Although this extension is moderate, it nevertheless allows for extremely fast traversal times that overshadow known physical solutions to the ‘Ant-in-a-Labyrinth’ problem. To explain this large payoff, we use percolation theory and prove that whenever the labyrinth is solvable, a logarithmically small sensing range suffices for extreme speedup. Overall, our work demonstrates the potential advantages of group living and collective cognition in increasing a species’ habitable range.

Ant colonies regulate foraging in response to their collective hunger, yet the mechanism behind this distributed regulation remains unclear. Previously, by imaging food flow within ant colonies we showed that the frequency of foraging events declines linearly with colony satiation (Greenwald et al., 2018). Our analysis implied that as a forager distributes food in the nest, two factors affect her decision to exit for another foraging trip: her current food load and its rate of change. Sensing these variables can be attributed to the forager's individual cognitive ability. Here, new analyses of the foragers' trajectories within the nest imply a different way to achieve the observed regulation. Instead of an explicit decision to exit, foragers merely tend toward the depth of the nest when their food load is high and toward the nest exit when it is low. Thus, the colony shapes the forager's trajectory by controlling her unloading rate, while she senses only her current food load. Using an agent-based model and mathematical analysis, we show that this simple mechanism robustly yields emergent regulation of foraging frequency. These findings demonstrate how the embedding of individuals in physical space can reduce their cognitive demands without compromising their computational role in the group., Competing Interests: LB, GF, OF No competing interests declared, (© 2023, Baltiansky, Frankel et al.)

The cognitive abilities of biological organisms only make sense in the context of their environment. Here, we study longhorn crazy ant collective navigation skills within the context of a semi-natural, randomized environment. Mapping this biological setting into the 'Ant-in-a-Labyrinth' framework which studies physical transport through disordered media allows us to formulate precise links between the statistics of environmental challenges and the ants' collective navigation abilities. We show that, in this environment, the ants use their numbers to collectively extend their sensing range. Although this extension is moderate, it nevertheless allows for extremely fast traversal times that overshadow known physical solutions to the 'Ant-in-a-Labyrinth' problem. To explain this large payoff, we use percolation theory and prove that whenever the labyrinth is solvable, a logarithmically small sensing range suffices for extreme speedup. Overall, our work demonstrates the potential advantages of group living and collective cognition in increasing a species' habitable range., Competing Interests: AG, EF, YR, AK, OF No competing interests declared, (© 2020, Gelblum et al.)