With a little help from my friends: Individual and collaborative performance during trail clearing in leaf‐cutting ants

ALMA, ANDREA MARINA; FARJI?BRENER, ALEJANDRO G.; ELIZALDE, LUCIANA

BIOTROPICA

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Año: 2020 vol. 52 p. 554 - 562

0006-3606

Social organisms express collaborative behaviors, allowing them to solve problemsthat exceed their individual capabilities. Group coordination and environmental contextare some of the factors that may determine the performance of individual andcollaborative strategies. Using the trail-clearing behavior of leaf-cutting ants, weevaluated experimentally for both strategies whether the success probability andclearing time depend on problem characteristics and context. We placed obstaclesof different sizes and shapes (problem characteristics), in trails with different foragers´fluxes and soil roughness (context) in 10 field nests of Atta cephalotes, andcompared removal success (i.e., if ants could remove obstacles) and time of individualand collaborative strategies. Very large obstacles could only be removed collaboratively,confirming individual limitations for transporting large objects. For all obstacleshapes, collaborative removals were more successful but took longer, suggestingthat coordination among individuals delays these actions. Individual strategies werefaster, regardless of ant flux. However, as ant flux increased, removal success washigher for collaborative than for individual removals. Lastly, trail roughness had noeffect. This work highlights one advantage of sociality, the option of collaborativelysolving problems that exceed the individual abilities. In addition, it reveals the associatedcosts of joint actions, since they can be time-consuming presumably due tocoordination problems.