Alarm signal propagation through ant colonies provides an empirically tractable context for analysing information flow through a natural system, with useful insights for network dynamics in other social animals. Here, we develop a methodological approach to track alarm spread within a group of harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex californicus . We initially alarmed three ants and tracked subsequent signal transmission through the colony. Because there was no actual standing threat, the false alarm allowed us to assess amplification and adaptive damping of the collective alarm response. We trained a random forest regression model to quantify alarm behaviour of individual workers from multiple movement features. Our approach translates subjective categorical alarm scores into a reliable, continuous variable. We combined these assessments with automatically tracked proximity data to construct an alarm propagation network. This method enables analyses of spatio-temporal patterns in alarm signal propagation in a group of ants and provides an opportunity to integrate individual and collective alarm response. Using this system, alarm propagation can be manipulated and assessed to ask and answer a wide range of questions related to information and misinformation flow in social networks.
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The Alarm Pheromone and Alarm Response of the Clonal Raider Ant
Ants communicate via an arsenal of different pheromones produced in a variety of exocrine glands. For example, ants release alarm pheromones in response to danger to alert their nestmates and to trigger behavioral alarm responses. Here we characterize the alarm pheromone and the alarm response of the clonal raider ant
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10396496
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Chemical Ecology
- Volume:
- 49
- Issue:
- 1-2
- ISSN:
- 0098-0331
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 1-10
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Deciphering the mechanisms that underpin dietary specialization and niche partitioning is crucial to understanding the maintenance of biodiversity. New world army ants live in species‐rich assemblages throughout the Neotropics and are voracious predators of other arthropods. They are therefore an important and potentially informative group for addressing how diverse predator assemblages partition available prey resources.
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