While the striking structures (eg nest architecture, trail networks) of insect societies may
seem familiar to many of us, the understanding of pattern formation still constitutes a …

The choice of a new nest site is ecologically critical for an insect colony. In swarm-founding
social insects, or those that move as colonies from one site to another, this choice is one of …

Fish travel in schools, birds migrate in flocks, honeybees swarm, and ants build trails. How
and why do these collective behaviors occur? Exploring how coordinated group patterns …

The roots of swarm intelligence are deeply embedded in the biological study of self-
organized behaviors in social insects. From the routing of traffic in telecommunication …

Animal groups are said to make consensus decisions when group members come to agree
on the same option. Consensus decisions are taxonomically widespread and potentially …

Aggregation is widespread in invertebrate societies and can appear in response to
environmental heterogeneities or by attraction between individuals. We performed …

Publisher Summary This chapter compares collective decisions in hives and in ant nests by
relating the properties of recruiting signals to the foraging strategies displayed by these two …

Colonies of the ant Temnothorax (formerly Leptothorax) albipennis can collectively choose
the best of several nest sites, even when many of the active ants who organize the move visit …

Complex biological systems are increasingly understood in terms of the algorithms that
guide the behavior of system components and the information pathways that link them. Much …

The mechanisms by which group-living animals collectively exploit resources, and the role
of individuals in group decisions, are central issues for understanding animal distribution …