Department of Entomology, College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State University, State College, United States
Ewan Colman
Department of Biology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, United States
Ephraim M Hanks
Department of Statistics, Eberly College of Science, Penn State University, State College, United States
Ryan Bringenberg
Department of Entomology, College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State University, State College, United States
Shweta Bansal
Department of Biology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, United States
David P Hughes
Department of Entomology, College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State University, State College, United States; Department of Biology, Eberly College of Science, Penn State University, State College, United States
Interactions lie at the heart of social organization, particularly in ant societies. Interaction rates are presumed to increase with density, but there is little empirical evidence for this. We manipulated density within carpenter ant colonies of the species Camponotus pennsylvanicus by quadrupling nest space and by manually tracking 6.9 million ant locations and over 3200 interactions to study the relationship between density, spatial organization and interaction rates. Colonies divided into distinct spatial regions on the basis of their underlying spatial organization and changed their movement patterns accordingly. Despite a reduction in both overall and local density, we did not find the expected concomitant reduction in interaction rates across all colonies. Instead, we found divergent effects across colonies. Our results highlight the remarkable organizational resilience of ant colonies to changes in density, which allows them to sustain two key basic colony life functions, that is food and information exchange, during environmental change.
