Outputs (41)

Symbionts of societies that fission: Mites as guests or parasites of army ants (2009)
Journal Article
Berghoff, S. M., Wurst, E., Ebermann, E., Sendova-Franks, A. B., Rettenmeyer, C. W., & Franks, N. R. (2009). Symbionts of societies that fission: Mites as guests or parasites of army ants. Ecological Entomology, 34(6), 684-695. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2311.2009.01125.x

Recently, Hughes et al. (Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23, 672-677, 2008) have theorised that symbionts of large, long-lived, homeostatic, and well defended social insect colonies should mostly be of low virulence. If the symbionts are rare, i.e. fe... Read More about Symbionts of societies that fission: Mites as guests or parasites of army ants.

Division of labour in ant colonies in terms of attractive fields (2009)
Journal Article
Arcaute, E., Christensen, K., Sendova-Franks, A. B., Dahl, T., Espinosa, A., & Jensen, H. J. (2009). Division of labour in ant colonies in terms of attractive fields. Ecological Complexity, 6(4), 396-402. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecocom.2008.10.001

In nature there exist many mechanisms giving rise to self-regulation. One such mechanism is the division of labour in insect societies. Within this work we propose a mathematical model for the allocation of tasks in ant colonies, where each of the ta... Read More about Division of labour in ant colonies in terms of attractive fields.

Radio tagging reveals the roles of corpulence, experience and social information in ant decision making (2009)
Journal Article
Robinson, E. J., Richardson, T. O., Sendova-Franks, A. B., Feinerman, O., & Franks, N. R. (2009). Radio tagging reveals the roles of corpulence, experience and social information in ant decision making. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 63(5), 627-636. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-008-0696-z

Ant colonies are factories within fortresses (Oster and Wilson 1978). They run on resources foraged from an outside world fraught with danger. On what basis do individual ants decide to leave the safety of the nest? We investigated the relative roles... Read More about Radio tagging reveals the roles of corpulence, experience and social information in ant decision making.

The behaviour of ant transporters at the old and new nests during successive colony emigrations (2008)
Journal Article
Langridge, E. A., Sendova-Franks, A. B., & Franks, N. R. (2008). The behaviour of ant transporters at the old and new nests during successive colony emigrations. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 62(12), 1851-1861. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-008-0614-4

Colonies of the ant Temnothorax albipennis improve their collective performance over successive emigrations (Langridge et al. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 56:523-529, 2004, Behav Ecol Sociobiol 62:447-456, 2008). Here, by analysing the performance of individ... Read More about The behaviour of ant transporters at the old and new nests during successive colony emigrations.

Can ant colonies choose a far-and-away better nest over an in-the-way poor one? (2008)
Journal Article
Robinson, E. J., Sullivan, K. M., Franks, N. R., Hardcastle, K. A., Collins, S., Smith, F. D., & Sendova-Franks, A. B. (2008). Can ant colonies choose a far-and-away better nest over an in-the-way poor one?. Animal Behaviour, 76(2), 323-334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.02.009

Nest choice in the ant Temnothorax albipennis is a model system for investigating collective decision making. Previous research has demonstrated the sophistication of this decentralized system, yet such studies have focused on binary choices in which... Read More about Can ant colonies choose a far-and-away better nest over an in-the-way poor one?.

Individual and collective choice: Parallel prospecting and mining in ants (2008)
Journal Article
Aleksiev, A. S., Longdon, B., Christmas, M. J., Sendova-Franks, A. B., & Franks, N. R. (2008). Individual and collective choice: Parallel prospecting and mining in ants. Naturwissenschaften, 95(4), 301-305. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-007-0329-9

Decision making is of crucial importance in the lives of both animals and humans. How decisions of group members scale up to group decisions is of great interest. Accordingly, we gave homeless ant colonies (n=67) in three experiments a choice between... Read More about Individual and collective choice: Parallel prospecting and mining in ants.

How experienced individuals contribute to an improvement in collective performance in ants (2008)
Journal Article
Langridge, E. A., Sendova-Franks, A. B., & Franks, N. R. (2008). How experienced individuals contribute to an improvement in collective performance in ants. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 62(3), 447-456. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-007-0472-5

Certain groups of organisms are capable of improving their collective performance with experience. In a recent study, we demonstrated that, over successive emigrations, colonies of the ant Temnothorax albipennis are able to improve their collective p... Read More about How experienced individuals contribute to an improvement in collective performance in ants.

Improvement in collective performance with experience in ants (2004)
Journal Article
Langridge, E. A., Franks, N. R., & Sendova-Franks, A. B. (2004). Improvement in collective performance with experience in ants. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 56(6), 523-529. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-004-0824-3

We show that entire ant colonies can improve their collective performance progressively when they repeat the same process. Colonies of Leptothorax albipennis can reduce their total emigration times over successive emigrations. We show that this impro... Read More about Improvement in collective performance with experience in ants.

Algorithms for building annular structures with minimalist robots inspired by brood sorting in ant colonies (2004)
Journal Article
Wilson, M., Melhuish, C., Sendova-Franks, A. B., & Scholes, S. (2004). Algorithms for building annular structures with minimalist robots inspired by brood sorting in ant colonies. Autonomous Robots, 17(2-3), 115-136. https://doi.org/10.1023/B%3AAURO.0000033969.52486.3d

This study shows that a task as complicated as multi-object 'ant-like annular sorting' can be accomplished with 'minimalist' solutions employing simple mechanisms and minimal hardware. It provides an alternative to 'patch sorting' for multi-object so... Read More about Algorithms for building annular structures with minimalist robots inspired by brood sorting in ant colonies.

Random walk models of worker sorting in ant colonies (2002)
Journal Article
Sendova-Franks, A. B., & Van Lent, J. (2002). Random walk models of worker sorting in ant colonies. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 217(2), 255-274. https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2002.3011

Sorting can be an important mechanism for the transfer of information from one level of biological organization to another. Here we study the algorithm underlying worker sorting in Leptothorax ant colonies. Worker sorting is related to task allocatio... Read More about Random walk models of worker sorting in ant colonies.