Group strategy
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Ants working together to carry something must move it over rough terrain. If they come across an obstacle, they have to figure out how to move around it, and they must to this collectively. Navigating around an obstacle requires making a series of decisions that build on one another. Obstacles pose problems to groups of ants. I look at how groups of Paratrechina longicornis ants solve these problems – what kind of strategy do they use for obstacle navigation? This work was featured in The New York Times and Inside JEB.
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Self-assembly
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Army ants in the Eciton genus have high traffic on their foraging and migration trails, and to optimize traffic flow, these ants construct bridges out of themselves. This allows the trail to more easily cross gaps in heterogeneous terrain. As part of a collaborative effort, I am currently exploring how army ants construct and deconstruct these bridges, and how the bridges adapt to changing gap size.
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Consensus decisions
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Many groups must make consensus decisions, about where to travel, or when to leave a foraging patch. I study consensus decisions during cooperative transport in ants. Cooperative transport is prone to deadlocks – in uncoordinated species, individuals pull in opposite directions. Efficient species – which can move objects many thousands of times their mass – overcome deadlocks rapidly. I use theoretical models and empirical studies to explore the individual-level traits and behaviors that allow group-level consensus. I use models to identify hypotheses for behavioral rules and other traits that should make for good transporters, and test those hypotheses empirically.
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