Publications by theme
ATTENTION: Website under construction. Note that publications are not sorted by year. All articles are peer-reviewed unless otherwise marked.
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Overview articles
Overview articles
Dornhaus A 2014 ‘Finding food: foraging affects all aspects of an animal’s life’, in: Yasukawa K ‘Animal Behavior, Volume II: Function and Evolution of Animal Behavior’, Praeger Publishers - pdf - textbook chapter for a general audience on what animals do to find food
Dornhaus A, Powell S 2010 ‘Foraging and defence strategies’ In: ‘Ant Ecology’, Eds. L Lach, C Parr, K Abbott, Ant Ecology, Oxford University Press [invited chapter in edited book] - pdf - edited book chapter reviewing communication/recruitment and defense strategies in ants
Dornhaus A, Powell S, Bengston S 2012 ‘Group size and its effects on collective organization’, Annual Review of Entomology 57: 123-141 - pdf - quantitative review on group sizes in insects, and review on how group size does or does not affect collective behavior
Bengston S, Charbonneau D, Dornhaus A 2021, ‘Temnothorax’ entry for Encyclopedia of Social Insects by Starr (Ed.), Springer - pdf - encyclopedia entry about the ant genus ‘Temnothorax’
Benefits and costs of communication in groups
We often intuitively feel that more information is always better, and that organizations will work more efficiently if more information is shared, but this is often not true for a variety of reasons - as anyone working for a large organization should know. Information has surprising costs: not just producing it, but also opportunity costs of waiting for it, low signal-to-noise ratio if sharing is not selective, too-high uniformity across individuals, difficult/slow updating of information across the group, and other non-obvious consequences of information sharing that are negative for individuals and groups.
Bee Dance and maps
Honey bees (Apis) communicate the locations of food sources - but bumble bees do not. Why?
We demonstrated that benefits of this are not actually common, and appear driven by rare, far away, but plentiful and diverse resources as found in the tropics.
Dornhaus, A, Chittka, L 2004 ‘Why do honey bees dance?’, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 55: 395-401
Dornhaus A, Klügl F, Oechslein C, Puppe F, Chittka L 2006 ‘Benefits of recruitment in honey bees: effects of ecology and colony size in an individual-based model’, Behavioral Ecology 17: 336-344
Dornhaus, A 2002 ‘Significance of honeybee recruitment strategies depending on foraging distance (Hymenoptera : Apidae : Apis mellifera)’, Entomologia Generalis 26: 93-100
Donaldson-Matasci MC, Dornhaus A 2012 ‘How habitat affects the benefits of communication in collectively foraging honey bees’, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 66: 583-592.
Raine, N E, Ings, T C, Dornhaus, A, Saleh, N, Chittka, L 2006 ‘Adaptation, genetic drift, pleiotropy, and history in the evolution of bee foraging behavior’, Advances in the Study of Behavior 36: 305-354
Bee dance and time
Donaldson-Matasci MC, DeGrandi-Hoffman G, Dornhaus A 2013 ‘Bigger is better: honeybee colonies as distributed information-gathering systems’, Animal Behaviour 85: 585-592
Dechaume-Moncharmont, F-X, Dornhaus, A, Houston, A I, McNamara, J M, Collins, E J, Franks, N R 2005 ‘The hidden cost of information in collective foraging’, Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences 272: 1689-1695
Dornhaus A, Collins EJ, Dechaume-Moncharmont F-X, Houston A, Franks NR, McNamara J 2006 ‘Paying for information: partial loads in central place foragers’, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 61: 151-161
Uniformity vs creativity
Donaldson-Matasci M, Dornhaus A 2014 ‘Dance Communication Affects Consistency, but Not Breadth, of Resource Use in Pollen-Foraging Honey Bees’, PLOS One 9: e107527
Lanan M, Dornhaus A, Jones EI, Waser A, Bronstein JL 2012 ‘The trail less traveled: individual decision-making and its effect on group behavior’, PLoS One 7: e47976
mechanisms of communication in social insects
A lot of information-sharing in social insects is indirect; it may involve ‘blackboard architecture’ (depositing information in a central place) and/or cues (receivers extract information from behavior of knowledgeable individuals without explicit/evolved signals). Different species communicate different types of information (e.g. bumble bees communicate less information than honey bees).
Bumble bee dance
We demonstrated that successful bumble bee foragers returning to the nest do 3 things that communicate the presence and scent of food sources: deposit food in pots; run around like crazy (=’dance’); and produce a volatile pheromone from tergal glands.
Dornhaus, A., Chittka, L., 1999, ‘Evolutionary origins of bee dances’, Nature 401: 38 - pdf - tweet - first demonstration of ‘dance’ and scent learning based on honeypots in bumble bees (B. terrestris; no info about resource location communicated
Dornhaus, A., Chittka, L., 2001, ‘Food alert in bumblebees (Bombus terrestris): possible mechanisms and evolutionary implications’, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 50: 570-576 - pdf - first demonstration that volatile pheromone involved, and that influx in honeypots is sufficient to achieve recruitment
Dornhaus, A, Brockmann, A, Chittka, L 2003 ‘Bumble bees alert to food with pheromone from tergal gland’, Journal of Comparative Physiology A 189: 47-51 - pdf - volatile recruitment pheromone emitted during bumble bee ‘dance’ is produced in small glands on tergites
Dornhaus, A, Chittka, L 2004 ‘Information flow and regulation of foraging activity in bumble bees’, Apidologie 35: 183-192 - pdf - short review on bumble bee recruitment system
Dornhaus, A, Chittka, L 2005 ‘Bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) store both food and information in honeypots’, Behavioral Ecology 16: 661-666 - pdf - potential foragers monitor both amount and concentration of nectar in honeypots; activation in response to influx is quality-dependent and affected by overall nectar stored, thus serving as ‘information center’
Granero, A M, Guerra Sanz, J M, Ega Gonzalez, F J, Martinez Vidal, J L, Dornhaus, A, Ghani, J, Serrano, A R, Chittka, L 2005 ‘Chemical compounds of the foraging recruitment pheromone in bumblebees’, Naturwissenschaften 92: 371-374 - pdf - recruitment pheromone found to consist of eucalyptol, ocimene and farnesol, with eucalyptol most active
Dornhaus, A, Cameron, S 2003 ‘A scientific note on food alert in Bombus transversalis’, Apidologie 34: 87-88 - pdf - B. transversalis appears to use the same recruitment strategies as B. terrestris
Chittka, L, Dornhaus, A 1999 ‘Comparisons in physiology and evolution, and why bees can do the things they do’, Ciencia al Dia International 2: No 2,
Honey bees
Thom C, Dornhaus A 2007 ‘Preliminary report on the use of volatile compounds by foraging honey bees in the hive (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Apis)’ Entomologia generalis 29: 299-304 - pdf - honey bees appear to use a volatile pheromone to activate other foragers similar to bumble bees
Rivera M, Donaldson-Matasci M, Dornhaus A 2015 ‘Quitting time: When do honey bee foragers decide to stop foraging on natural resources?’, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 3: 50 - pdf - we do not find that either delay to or duration of trophallaxis predict when foragers give up on resources; contrary to claims that amount of nectar found on a foraging trip and social need for nectar, thought to correlate with trophallaxis duration and delay respectively, should determine this
Ants
Cao TT, Dornhaus A 2012 ‘Ants use pheromone markings in emigrations to move closer to food-rich areas’, Insectes sociaux 59: 87-92 - pdf - Temnorthorax rugatulus ants are not entirely individualistic foragers, but instead appear to leave footprint pheromones’ these bias traffic/scouts in other contexts, e.g. emigration to a new nest