The organization of societal conflicts by pavement ants Tetramorium caespitum: an agent-based model of amine-mediated decision making.

ABSTRACT: Ant colonies self-organize to solve complex problems despite the simplicity of an individual ant's brain. Pavement ant Tetramorium caespitum colonies must solve the problem of defending the territory that they patrol in search of energetically rich forage. When members of 2 colonies randomly interact at the territory boundary a decision to fight occurs when: 1) there is a mismatch in nestmate recognition cues and 2) each ant has a recent history of high interaction rates with nestmate ants. Instead of fighting, some ants will decide to recruit more workers from the nest to the fighting location, and in this way a positive feedback mediates the development of colony wide wars. In ants, the monoamines serotonin (5-HT) and octopamine (OA) modulate many behaviors associated with colony

SUBMITTER: Hoover KM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5829439 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature