Skip to main content
bioRxiv
  • Home
  • About
  • Submit
  • ALERTS / RSS
Advanced Search
New Results

Better tired than lost: turtle ant trail networks favor coherence over short edges

View ORCID ProfileArjun Chandrasekhar, James A. R. Marshall, Cortnea Austin, Saket Navlakha, Deborah M. Gordon
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/714410
Arjun Chandrasekhar
1Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • ORCID record for Arjun Chandrasekhar
James A. R. Marshall
2Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Cortnea Austin
3Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA 98926
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Saket Navlakha
4Simons Center for Quantitative Biology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, 11724
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • For correspondence: navlakha@cshl.edu dmgordon@stanford.edu
Deborah M. Gordon
5Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • For correspondence: navlakha@cshl.edu dmgordon@stanford.edu
  • Abstract
  • Full Text
  • Info/History
  • Metrics
  • Supplementary material
  • Preview PDF
Loading

Abstract

Creating a routing backbone is a fundamental problem in both biology and engineering. The routing backbone of the trail networks of arboreal turtle ants (Cephalotes goniodontus) connects many nests and food sources using trail pheromone deposited by ants as they walk. Unlike species that forage on the ground, the trail networks of arboreal ants are constrained by the vegetation. We examined what objectives the trail networks meet by comparing the observed ant trail networks with networks of random, hypothetical trail networks in the same surrounding vegetation and with trails optimized for four objectives: minimizing path length, minimizing average edge length, minimizing number of nodes, and minimizing opportunities to get lost. The ants’ trails minimized path length by minimizing the number of nodes traversed rather than choosing short edges. In addition, the ants’ trails reduced the opportunity for ants to get lost at each node, favoring nodes with 3D configurations most likely to be reinforced by pheromone. Thus, rather than finding the shortest edges, turtle ant trail networks take advantage of natural variation in the environment to favor coherence, keeping the ants together on the trails.

Author Summary We investigated the trail networks of arboreal turtle ants in the canopy of the tropical forest, to ask what characterizes the colony’s choice of foraging paths within the vegetation. We monitored day to day changes in the junctions and edges of trail networks of colonies in the dry forest of western Mexico. We compared the paths used by the ants to simulated random paths in the surrounding vegetation. We found that the paths of turtle ants prioritize coherence, keeping ants together on the trail, over minimizing the average edge length. The choice of paths reduces the number of junctions in the trail where ants could get lost, and favors junctions with a physical configuration that makes it likely that successive ants will reinforce the same path. Our work suggests that design principles that emphasize keeping information flow constrained to streamlined, coherent trails may be useful in human-designed distributed routing and transport networks or robot swarms.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • We have reworded our manuscript in several places to clarify how we measured distance travelled. We make it clear that turtle ants optimize total edge length, but not average edge length. We propose that turtle ants minimize total edge length by using fewer nodes (and thus fewer edges), rather than by using shorter edges. We have also updated our visualizations to better represent our results.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
Back to top
PreviousNext
Posted September 29, 2021.
Download PDF

Supplementary Material

Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word about bioRxiv.

NOTE: Your email address is requested solely to identify you as the sender of this article.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Better tired than lost: turtle ant trail networks favor coherence over short edges
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from bioRxiv
(Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from the bioRxiv website.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Share
Better tired than lost: turtle ant trail networks favor coherence over short edges
Arjun Chandrasekhar, James A. R. Marshall, Cortnea Austin, Saket Navlakha, Deborah M. Gordon
bioRxiv 714410; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/714410
Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo LinkedIn logo Mendeley logo
Citation Tools
Better tired than lost: turtle ant trail networks favor coherence over short edges
Arjun Chandrasekhar, James A. R. Marshall, Cortnea Austin, Saket Navlakha, Deborah M. Gordon
bioRxiv 714410; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/714410

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

Subject Area

  • Ecology
Subject Areas
All Articles
  • Animal Behavior and Cognition (4385)
  • Biochemistry (9611)
  • Bioengineering (7106)
  • Bioinformatics (24903)
  • Biophysics (12636)
  • Cancer Biology (9974)
  • Cell Biology (14375)
  • Clinical Trials (138)
  • Developmental Biology (7966)
  • Ecology (12127)
  • Epidemiology (2067)
  • Evolutionary Biology (16003)
  • Genetics (10936)
  • Genomics (14758)
  • Immunology (9882)
  • Microbiology (23700)
  • Molecular Biology (9490)
  • Neuroscience (50940)
  • Paleontology (370)
  • Pathology (1541)
  • Pharmacology and Toxicology (2687)
  • Physiology (4027)
  • Plant Biology (8675)
  • Scientific Communication and Education (1512)
  • Synthetic Biology (2402)
  • Systems Biology (6445)
  • Zoology (1346)