动物群体需要达成并保持共识,以最大程度地减少个体之间的冲突并防止群体分裂。共识挑战的一个很好的例子是合作运输,多个人合作一起移动一个大项目。这种行为,只由蚂蚁和人类定期展示,要求个人同意向哪个方向移动。不像人类,蚂蚁不能使用口头交流,但很可能依靠私人信息和/或通过携带物品感知到的机械力来协调它们的行为。这里,我们研究了编织蚂蚁群体如何在使用系留对象协议的协作传输过程中达成共识,蚂蚁不得不运输一个用细绳拴在适当位置的猎物。该协议允许将知情蚂蚁的运动与不知情的个体的运动脱钩。我们表明,织工蚂蚁将所有小组成员的意见汇集在一起,以提高其导航准确性。我们使用对称破缺任务证实了这个结果,我们挑战蚂蚁在开放式走廊上航行。织草蚂蚁是第一个报告的蚂蚁物种使用“人群智慧”策略进行合作运输,证明共识机制可能因每个物种的生态而异。
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.