Ant Lasius niger joining one-way trails go against the flow

Abstract

Abstract Social insects, such as ants, use various pheromones as their social signal. In addition, they use the presence of other ants for decision-making. In this study, we attempted to evaluate if individual decision-making is influenced by the complementary use of pheromones and presence of other ants. Ants were induced to form a one-way flow system. We found that when ants entered such a system at a right angle, they tended to move in the opposite direction of the one-way flow system. Interestingly, the target ants moved randomly in the experiments in which no ant and/or no pheromone trails were present. We also developed simulation algorithms and found that artificial ant foragers could reach a certain goal more often if they adopted the reverse run (similar mechanism found in ant experiments) over the forward run (moving in the same direction as their nestmates).