Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [163]
32. Theodore Schneirla, the father of all army ant research, thought that army ants could find their way home in more or less this manner, though he proposed that odor may also influence their directional choices at trail intersections; see Theodore C. Schneirla, Army Ants: A Study in Social Organization (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1971).
33. A more complicated theory of “lane formation” is developed in ID Couzin, NR Franks 2003, Self-organized lane formation and optimized traffic flow in army ants, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. Ser. B 270: 139–146.
34. A John, A Schadschneider, D Chowdhury, K Nishinari 2008, Characteristics of ant-inspired traffic flow, Swarm Intell. 2: 25–41; A Dussutour, J-L Deneubourg, V Fourcassié 2005, Temporal organization of bi-directional traffic in the ant Lasius niger, J. Exp. Biol. 208: 2903–2912; and D Helbing, P Molnár, IJ Farkas, K Bolay 2001, Self organizing pedestrian movement, Envir. Plann. B 28: 361–383.
4. Infrastructure
This chapter derives mostly from MW Moffett, Nesting, emigrations, and colony foundation in two group-hunting myrmicine ants, in Advances in Myrmecology, ed. James C. Trager and George C. Wheeler (New York: EJ Brill, 1989), pp. 355–370; and MW Moffett 1987, Division of labor and diet in the polymorphic species Pheidologeton diversus, Nat. Geogr. Res. 3: 282–304.
1. H Samaniego, ME Moses 2008, Cities as organisms: Allometric scaling of urban road networks, J. Trans. Land Use 1: 21–39; and John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Complexity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Unlike vertebrate circulatory systems, human highway systems tend to be decentralized, as are trails for species such as the weaver ant (see chapter 9).
2. The lower cost to ants of sticking to clear paths rather than going over rough ground is addressed in JH Fewell 1988, Energetic and time costs of foraging in harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex occidentalis, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 22: 401–408.
3. See, e.g., AS Aleksiev, B Longdon, MJ Christmas, AB Sendova-Franks, NR Franks 2007, Individual choice of building material for nest construction by worker ants and the collective outcome for their colony, Anim. Behav. 74: 559–566.
4. R Beckers, OE Holland, J-L Deneubourg 1994, From local actions to global tasks: Stigmergy and collective robotics, in Artificial Life IV: Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, ed. Rodney A. Brooks and Pattie Maes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 181–189. For further examples of stigmergy, see G Theraulaz, J Gautrais, S Camazine, J-L Deneubourg 2003, The formation of spatial patterns in social insects: From simple behaviours to complex structures, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. Ser. A, 361: 1263–1282; and Thomas D. Seeley, The Wisdom of the Hive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
5. MA Elloitt 2007, Stigmergic collaboration, Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, Australia.
6. Smaller majors also perform the shoving task, but with more limited effectiveness. Such is the irony of being proficient at a job in a society: rather than growing in number as a result, as do urban pigeons adept at building nests on every window ledge, an efficiently run colony gets by with fewer extreme specialists—and possibly, when their duties are rare enough, perilously few; see EO Wilson 1968, The ergonomics of caste in the social insects, Am. Nat. 102: 41–66.
7. DL Cassill, K Vo, B Becker 2008, Young fire ant workers feign death and survive aggressive neighbors, Naturwissenschaften 95: 617–624.
8. For defensive behaviors generally, see A Buschinger, U Maschwitz 1984, Defensive behavior and defensive mechanisms in ants, in Defensive Mechanisms in Social Insects, ed. Henry R. Hermann (New York: Praeger, 1984),