Ant Colony Strategies For Task Performance: Multitasking Workers And Multiworker Tasks

Sam Beshers, Program Coordinator, Neuroscience and Research Associate, Department of Entomology, UIUC

One of the most important questions in social insect biology is how the emergent behavior of the colony arises from the decisions and actions of individual workers. To address this question, it is critically important to understand the strategies by which colonies achieve high performance levels, and how individual behavior patterns may contribute to colony performance. Traditionally it has been assumed that individuals are task specialists, and that this increases their own efficiency and that of the colony.

I will present and discuss data on task performance in the leaf-cutting ant, Atta colombica, and will argue that 1) task performance must be understood on the level of the colony, not the individual worker, 2) specialization is costly and colonies should often make use of the same workers to perform multiple tasks, 3) allocation of appropriate numbers of workers is generally more important than individual efficiency, 4) the specific characteristics of each task determine the allocation needed and when specialization will benefit the colony, and 5) some tasks have multiple components, for which different sets of workers may be used, some perhaps specialized and others not.

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