Information Processing in Social Insects

Claire Detrain, Jean-Louis Deneubourg and Jacques Pasteels Studies on insects have been pioneering in major fields of modern biology. In the 1970 s, research on pheromonal communication in insects gave birth to the dis­ cipline of chemical ecology and provided a scientific frame to extend this approach to other animal groups. In the 1980 s, the theory of kin selection, which was initially formulated by Hamilton to explain the rise of eusociality in insects, exploded into a field of research on its own and found applications in the under­ standing of community structures including vertebrate ones. In the same manner, recent studies, which decipher the collective behaviour of insect societies, might be now setting the stage for the elucidation of information processing in animals. Classically, problem solving is assumed to rely on the knowledge of a central unit which must take decisions and collect all pertinent information. However, an alternative method is extensively used in nature: problems can be collectively solved through the behaviour of individuals, which interact with each other and with the environment. The management of information, which is a major issue of animal behaviour, is interesting to study in a social life context, as it raises addi­ tional questions about conflict-cooperation trade-oft's. Insect societies have proven particularly open to experimental analysis: one can easily assemble or disassemble them and place them in controllable situations in the laboratory.

Table of Contents:
1 Group size and information flow inside the colony.- Group size, productivity, and information flow in social wasps.- Task partitioning in foraging: general principles, efficiency and information reliability of queueing delays.- Interaction patterns and task allocation in ant colonies.- Information flow during social feeding in ant societies.- Models of information flow in ant foraging: the benefits of both attractive and repulsive signals.- Information flow in the social domain: how individuals decide what to do next.- 2 Role and control of behavioral thresholds.- Response thresholds and division of labor in insect colonies.- Role and variability of response thresholds in the regulation of division of labor in insect societies.- Social control of division of labor in honey bee colonies.- Genetic, developmental and environmental determinants of honey bee foraging behavior.- Behavioral threshold variability: costs and benefits in insect societies.- 3 The individual at the core of information management.- Individuality and colonial identity in ants: the emergence of the social representation concept.- Key individuals and the organisation of labor in ants.- Temporal information in social insects.- The individual at the core of information management.- 4 Amplification of information and emergence of collective patterns.- Activity cycles in ant colonies: worker interactions and decentralized control.- The mechanisms and rules of coordinated building in social insects.- Decision-making in foraging by social insects.- The mystery of swarming honeybees: from individual behaviors to collective decisions.- Collective behavior in social caterpillars.- Self-organization or individual complexity: a false dilemma or a true complementarity?.