I use ants and other organisms as models to answer questions about collective behavior. My primary research areas are:
- Mechanisms: Connecting individual-level behavior with group-level results
- Evolutionary benefits: Exploring group-level performance and strategy
- Flexibility: How do collectives dynamically respond to rapid changes?
Mechanisms: Connecting individual-level behavior with group-level results
Cooperative transport
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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 (e.g. paper link) and empirical studies (e.g. paper link) 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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Evolutionary benefits: Exploring group-level performance and strategy
Obstacle navigation
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Ants working together to carry something must collectively navigate around obstacles. This requires making a series of decisions that build on one another, or problem-solving. I look at how groups of Paratrechina longicornis ants solve these problems (e.g. paper link) – what kind of strategy do they use for obstacle navigation? This work was featured in The New York Times and Inside JEB. I also explore the robustness and efficiency of this collective strategy, and I am exploring collective obstacle navigation in theoretical and empirical projects in other animal groups.
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I also explore the limits of ant cooperative transport by studying how groups contend with the wide variation of objects they carry (e.g. paper link). I explore how properties of the objects - like mass and size - affect the dynamics and success of group transport. The ants have no trouble carrying the heaviest objects, even one weighing 1,900 times the mass of an individual! |
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Flexibility: How do collectives dynamically respond to rapid changes?
Self-assembly
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Groups get many benefits from cooperation, but this often comes at the cost of flexibility. Yet some collectives are still flexible - how do they maintain this flexibility? 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, that adjust constantly to changes. I am currently exploring how army ants construct and deconstruct these bridges, and especially how the bridges flexibly adapt to changes in gap size, which frequently occur as they are built on unstable surfaces such as leaves and twigs.
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