Joshi, C. H. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2026

Frequent errors are the worst: robustness to individual failures in collective foraging

The collective behavior of complex systems emerges from the actions and interactions of their individual components. But what if these individuals make mistakes, or deviate from behavior tuned to lead to collective success? Here, we explore the effects of individual errors on collective outcomes. We investigate in particular whether information flow among individuals exacerbates or mitigates such individual failures. We use an agent-based, spatially explicit model inspired by collective foraging in social insects. Social insect colonies forage for food with autonomous workers who search for and exploit resources around the central nest, as well as share information about discovered resources. We find that the errors that have the most chances of occurring had the strongest impacts: for example, false positive detections can occur at any time during search, and each such error derailed exploration activity. Similarly, forgetting errors are potentially frequent and detrimental to resource exploitation. Despite the fact that communication inherently may narrow the breadth of information used by a colony, we found, in contrast, that it enhanced spatial exploration in our model. Communication in our model also reduced the effects of individual errors, instead of permitting erroneous information to spread. Our model thus illustrates that communication plays a central role in error management in complex systems, and that the evolution of communication systems in social insects may be shaped by selection on exploration and error mitigation as well as on efficient food retrieval.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Persist or Give up? Fire ants motivated to search for a high-quality food source even if they don't know how to find it

Finding resources for the colony is one of the most difficult and risky tasks for a social insect worker. A worker on a foraging trip can face a number of challenges, including interference from other individuals, her own errors, and environmental disturbances. Collectively, colonies may use a variety of strategies to minimize the impact of such perturbations on the foraging process. Here, we investigated how individual Solenopsis xyloni ant workers react to perturbation of an established pheromone trail. We trained foragers from colonies in the field to either a low or high concentration sucrose solution in a feeder on a T-maze setup, then replaced a section of floor covering, removing a section of the pheromone trail previously laid. We found that while ants made correct choices on the T-maze when the trail was intact, their choices did not differ from chance when the trail was absent, indicating strong reliance on a pheromone trail (and not, for example, memory) to return to the resource. Moreover, when the trail was absent, we found that a majority of ants abandoned the resource, and that even the ants that were able to reach the resource did not repair the perturbed trail. However, with a high-quality resource, more ants persisted in attempting to reach it (instead of abandoning). We interpret these responses in the framework of robustness mechanisms discussed in systems biology. Our study thus links individual and collective responses to perturbations, and provides an empirical example of how information use interacts with system robustness. Statements and declarationsThe authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

animal behavior and cognition↗