Noa M. Pinter-Wollman: The University of California, San Diego

The behavior of biological systems emerges from the
self-organization of multiple agents that interact with one another
and follow simple local rules. However, not all individuals within the
system are identical. I study how individual variation in the behavior
of worker ants affects the behavior of the colony, a complex
biological system, as a whole. In social insects, natural selection
acts at the colony level. Colonies of harvester ants use interactions
among workers to closely regulate their foraging activity and balance
the trade-off between acquiring food and loosing water due to
desiccation while foraging. I will present empirical work from the
field and lab along with computer simulations to show how individual
variation in worker behavior affects the speed of information
processing by colonies. I further show that colonies vary in how they
adjust their collective behavior to environmental cues linking
variation at the colony level to behavioral variation among individual
workers. By exploring the causes and consequences of individual
variation within and among social insect colonies I hope to further
our understanding of how complex biological systems operate and
evolve.