Title: Uncovering the phasic nature and dynamics of nomadic behavior in the clonal raider ant (Ooceraea biroi)
Abstract: The understanding of social insect behavior is at its core, laden with questions of distributed computation. The concept of the “superorganism” frames colonies as the unit of selection, and it thus follows that the behavior of every individual within the colony must serve to benefit the colony as a whole. From the birth of a colony, a host of complex, cooperative decisions are made in perpetuity, solving problems of where to nest, how to distribute brood or food within the nest, how to maintain an appropriate microclimate, where, when, and how to forage, and the list goes on seemingly without end. In ants, these decisions arise from the joint efforts of as few as a dozen individuals in small colonies, to several millions of individuals in the largest colonies of leafcutter and army ants. It is now well understood that local interactions between insects and their environment (chemical cues, the shape of the landscape/substrate, etc.) provide signals they then transduce into some behavioral output. While the output can be undoubtedly fascinating, these stigmergic interactions are simple and physical in nature. However, a great deal of colony behavior, if not the majority, is complex and biological. Individuals are constantly faced with a menagerie of stimuli which must be weighted altogether and integrated with their own personal behavioral state, to then make a choice of how to act (or not). In many cases, this process results in a feat of emergent problem-solving, where the colony fulfills some task(s) which could not have otherwise been completed from the actions of just one or even a few individuals alone. Such is the case of nest relocation, an incredibly costly and complex behavior, as well as the focus of this paper.