Reina, A. and Marshall, J.A.R. (2022) Negative feedback may suppress variation to improve collective foraging performance. PLoS Computational Biology, 18 (5). e1010090. ISSN 1553-734X
Abstract
Social insect colonies use negative as well as positive feedback signals to regulate foraging behaviour. In ants and bees individual foragers have been observed to use negative pheromones or mechano-auditory signals to indicate that forage sources are not ideal, for example being unrewarded, crowded, or dangerous. Here we propose an additional function for negative feedback signals during foraging, variance reduction. We show that while on average populations will converge to desired distributions over forage patches both with and without negative feedback signals, in small populations negative feedback reduces variation around the target distribution compared to the use of positive feedback alone. Our results are independent of the nature of the target distribution, providing it can be achieved by foragers collecting only local information. Since robustness is a key aim for biological systems, and deviation from target foraging distributions may be costly, we argue that this could be a further important and hitherto overlooked reason that negative feedback signals are used by foraging social insects.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Animals; Ants; Bees; Crowding; Feedback; Feeding Behavior; Pheromones |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Computer Science (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number European Commission - HORIZON 2020 647704 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 13 Jun 2022 13:38 |
Last Modified: | 13 Jun 2022 13:38 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010090 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:187932 |