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Organization in groups, how collective behaviors emerge from the actions and interactions of individuals, is the main interest of Anna Dornhaus. As model systems she studies social insect colonies (bumble bees, honey bees and ants) in the laboratory and in the field, as well as using mathematical and individual-based modeling approaches. She investigates mechanisms of coordination in foraging, collective decision-making, task allocation and division of labor. Her recent work has included the role of communication in the allocation of foragers to food sources; the evolution of different recruitment systems in different species of bees, and how ecology shapes these recruitment systems; house hunting strategies in ants; speed-accuracy trade offs in decision-making; and whether different group sizes necessitate different organizational strategies.Show Less
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Courses
- IMBIntroduction to Modeling in Biology
- HSWAWISAGFTUIHTMSWFYHow Science Works And What It Says: A Guide For The Uninitiated In How To Make Science Work For You
- REEResearch in Ecology and Evolution
- MISMethods in Insect Science
- SECSociobiology and the Evolution of Cooperation
Grants
- Managing Emergent Behavior of Interacting Autonomous Systems
Principal Investigator (PI)
2018
$284.1K
- Studying Insect Collective Behavior as a Model for Distributed Computing (WAESO)
Principal Investigator (PI)
2018
$460.5
- Collaborative Research: ABI Development: A User-Friendly Tool for Highly Accurate Video Tracking
Principal Investigator (PI)
2016
$206.8K
- Managing Emergent Behavior of Interacting Autonomous Systems
Principal Investigator (PI)
2016
$48.0K
- BCSP: The Emergence of Inactivity: Adaptive Task Allocation in Complex Distributed Systems, or Why Are There So Many Lazy Ants?
Principal Investigator (PI)
2015
$695.0K
- Collaborative Proposal: ABI Innovation: Rapid, Interactive, Visual Mining of Biological Motion
Principal Investigator (PI)
2013
$276.1K
- Collaborative Proposal: Eager: Towards Real-Time, High Through Put Insect Behavior Analysis
Principal Investigator (PI)
2010
$75.2K
- Adaptive Distribution of Morphological Specialists in Social Insect: New Insights Into the Evolution of Division of labor
Principal Investigator (PI)
2009
$450.0K
- Flowers as Complex Signals: The Role of Signal Uncertainty
Co-Investigator (COI)
2009
$419.8K
News
- The ants go marching … methodically
2023
- Lazy Ants Make Themselves Useful in Unexpected Ways
2017
- Ants May Have Reason to Be Anti-Work
2015
- Science Lecture Series to Explore Life in the Universe
2015
- Under the Microscope: UA Student Takes Tiny Ants to the Big Screen
2013
- Division of Labor: Key to Evolution of Multicellular Life?
2012
- Ants Give New Evidence for Interaction Networks
2011
- College of Science Spring Lectures Focus on "Mind and Brain"
2010
- Charles Darwin’s 200th Birthday to be Commemorated on Campus
2009
- Can an Ant Be Employee-of-the-Month?
2008
Publications (115)
Recent
- Social pseudoscorpion nest architecture provides direct benefits to group members and rivals the efficiency of honey bees
2022
- Brood as booty: the effect of colony size and resource value in social insect contests
2022
- How Can We Fully Realize the Potential of Mathematical and Biological Models to Reintegrate Biology?
2021
- Foraging behavior and extended phenotype independently affect foraging success in spiders
2020
- Size variation does not act as insurance in bumble bees; instead, workers add weight in an unpredictable environment
2020
- Ants in isolation: obstacles to testing worker responses to task stimuli outside of the colony context
2019
- Metabolic rate predicts the lifespan of workers in the bumble bee Bombus impatiens
2019
- Signal categorization by foraging animals depends on ecological diversity.
2019
- Juvenile social experience generates differences in behavioral variation but not averages.
2019
- Dynamic task allocation: how and why do social insect workers take on new tasks?
2019
- Guard bees are more likely to act as undertakers: variation in corpse removal in the bumble bee Bombus impatiens
2019
- Author response: Signal categorization by foraging animals depends on ecological diversity
2019
- Bringing down the house: male widow spiders reduce the webs of aggressive females more
2019
- Peripheral sensory organs vary among ant workers but variation does not predict division of labor.
2018
- Lower temperatures decrease worker size variation but do not affect fine-grained thermoregulation in bumble bees
2018
- Metabolic rate is consistent with age and predicts the lifespan of the bumble bee Bombus impatiens
2018
- Learning about larceny: experience can bias bumble bees to rob nectar
2018
- Ant-Inspired Dynamic Task Allocation via Gossiping
2017
- Costs of task allocation with local feedback: Effects of colony size and extra workers in social insects and other multi-agent systems.
2017
- Task switching is associated with temporal delays in Temnothorax rugatulus ants.
2017
- Life‐history strategy and behavioral type: risk‐tolerance reflects growth rate and energy allocation in ant colonies
2017
- Who Are the Lazy Ants? The Function of Inactivity in Social Insects and a Possible Role of Constraint: Inactive Ants Are Corpulent and May Be Young and/or Selfish.
2017
- Context‐dependent defences in turtle ants: Resource defensibility and threat level induce dynamic shifts in soldier deployment
2017
- Sampling and tracking a changing environment: persistence and reward in the foraging decisions of bumblebees.
2017
- Who needs lazy workers? Inactive workers act as a reserve labor force replacing active workers, but inactive workers are not replaced when they are removed.
2017
- Temnothorax rugatulus ant colonies consistently vary in nest structure across time and context.
2017
- Behavioral caste is associated with distinct gene expression profiles in workers in Temnothorax rugatulus
2017
- Foraging bumble bees weigh the reliability of personal and social information
2016
- 'Lazy' in nature: ant colony time budgets show high 'inactivity' in the field as well as in the lab
2015
- Latitudinal variation in behaviors linked to risk-tolerance is driven by nest-site competition and spatial distribution in the ant Temnothorax rugatulus
2015
- When doing nothing is something. How task allocation strategies compromise between flexibility, efficiency, and inactive agents
2015
- Quitting time: When do honey bee foragers decide to stop foraging on natural resources?
2015
- Trading off short-term costs for long-term gains: how do bumblebees decide to learn morphologically complex flowers?
2015
- Multiple Insect Tracking with Occlusion Sub-tunnels
2015
- Workers 'specialized' on inactivity: behavioral consistency of inactive workers and their role in task allocation
2015
- Efficient Training of Multiple Ant Tracking
2015
- Ant tracking with occlusion tunnels
2014
- Bumblebee response thresholds and body size: does worker diversity increase colony performance?
2014
- Data association based ant tracking with interactive error correction
2014
- Dance Communication Affects Consistency, but Not Breadth, of Resource Use in Pollen-Foraging Honey Bees
2014
- Be meek or be bold? A colony-level behavioural syndrome in ants
2014
- Task Allocation in Ant Colonies
2014
- Morphological differences between extranidal and intranidal workers in the ant Temnothorax rugatulus, but no effect of body size on foraging distance
2014
- Bigger is better: Honeybee colonies as distributed information-gathering systems
2013
- Floral nectar guide patterns discourage nectar robbing by bumble bees
2013
- Soldier-based defences dynamically track resource availability and quality in ants
2013
- Colony size does not predict foraging distance in the ant Temnothorax rugatulus: A puzzle for standard scaling models
2013
- Larger laboratory colonies consume proportionally less energy and have lower per capita brood production in Temnothorax ants
2013
- Behavioural syndromes and social insects: personality at multiple levels
2013
- Tracking multiple ants in a colony
2013
- Multimodal signals enhance decision making in foraging bumble-bees
2012
- Erratum to How habitat affects the benefits of communication in collectively foraging honey bees (Behav Ecol Sociobiol, 10.1007/s00265-011-1306-z)
2012
- Temporal dynamics and network analysis
2012
- Finding optimal collective strategies using individual-based simulations: colony organization in social insects
2012
- Ants use pheromone markings in emigrations to move closer to food-rich areas
2012
- The Trail Less Traveled: Individual Decision-Making and Its Effect on Group Behavior
2012
- Floral signal complexity as a possible adaptation to environmental variability: A test using nectar-foraging bumblebees, Bombus impatiens
2012
- Individual bumblebees vary in response to disturbance: A test of the defensive reserve hypothesis
2012
- How is activity distributed among and within tasks in Temnothorax ants?
2012
- How habitat affects the benefits of communication in collectively foraging honey bees
2012
- Task-switching costs promote the evolution of division of labor and shifts in individuality
2012
- Group size and its effects on collective organization
2012
- Predation risk makes bees reject rewarding flowers and reduce foraging activity
2011
- Percent lipid is associated with body size but not task in the bumble bee Bombus impatiens
2011
- Forget-me-not: Complex floral displays, inter-signal interactions, and pollinator cognition
2011
- Competition and cooperation: Bumblebee spatial organization and division of labor may affect worker reproduction late in life
2011
- Multiple ant tracking with global foreground maximization and variable target proposal distribution
2011
- Time-ordered networks reveal limitations to information flow in ant colonies
2011
- Flowers help bees cope with uncertainty: signal detection and the function of floral complexity
2011
- The function of polydomy: the ant Crematogaster torosa preferentially forms new nests near food sources and fortifies outstations
2011
- Food Exploitation by Social Insects: Ecological, Behavioral, and Theoretical Approaches. Contemporary Topics in Entomology Series. Edited by Stefan Jarau and Michael Hrncir. CRC Press. Boca Raton (Florida): Taylor Francis. $119.95. xii + 348 p. + 4 pl.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-1-4200-7560-1. 2009.
2011
- Ecology: A prerequisite for malaria elimination and eradication
2010
- Ontogeny of worker body size distribution in bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) colonies
2010
- Ambient air temperature does not predict whether small or large workers forage in bumble bees (Bombus impatiens)
2010
- Small worker bumble bees (Bombus impatiens) are hardier against starvation than their larger sisters
2010
- On optimal decision-making in brains and social insect colonies
2009
- Spatial organization and division of labour in the bumble bee Bombus impatiens
2009
- Larger colonies do not have more specialized workers in the ant Temnothorax albipennis
2009
- Weak specialization of workers inside a bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) nest
2009
- A meta-analysis of ant social parasitism: Host characteristics of different parasitism types and a test of Emery's rule
2008
- Ants under crowded conditions consume more energy
2008
- Multimodal signals enhance decision-making in foraging bumble-bees
2008
- Why do not all workers work? Colony size and workload during emigrations in the ant Temnothorax albipennis
2008
- Individual and collective cognition in ants and other insects (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)
2008
- Specialization does not predict individual efficiency in an ant
2008
- Ventilation response thresholds do not change with age or self-reinforcement in workers of the bumble bee Bombus impatiens
2008
- Reconnaissance and latent learning in ants
2007
- Moving targets: collective decisions and flexible choices in house-hunting ants
2007
- Avoidance of conspecific colonies during nest choice by ants
2007
- Preliminary report on the use of volatile compounds by foraging honey bees in the hive (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Apis)
2007
- Adaptation, Genetic Drift, Pleiotropy, and History in the Evolution of Bee Foraging Behavior
2006
- Weighting waiting in collective decision-making
2006
- Decision making by small and large house-hunting ant colonies: one size fits all
2006
- Not everything that counts can be counted: Ants use multiple metrics for a single nest trait
2006
- Colony size affects collective decision-making in the ant Temnothorax albipennis
2006
- Paying for information: Partial loads in central place foragers
2006
- Benefits of recruitment in honey bees: Effects of ecology and colony size in an individual-based model
2006
- Noise, cost and speed-accuracy trade-offs: Decision-making in a decentralized system
2006
- Chemical compounds of the foraging recruitment pheromone in bumblebees
2005
- Bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) store both food and information in honeypots
2005
- Tomb evaders: House-hunting hygiene in ants
2005
- Why do honey bees dance?
2004
- Information flow and regulation of foraging activity in bumble bees (Bombus spp.)
2004
- Ants move to improve: Colonies of Leptothorax albipennis emigrate whenever they find a superior nest site
2004
- How might individual honeybees measure massive volumes?
2003
- Bumble bees alert to food with pheromone from tergal gland
2003
- Bees trade off foraging speed for accuracy
2003
- Speed versus accuracy in collective decision making
2003
- A scientific note on food alert in Bombus transversalis
2003
- Simulating the evolution of ant behaviour in evaluating nest sites
2003
- Significance of honeybee recruitment strategies depending on foraging distance (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Apis mellifera)
2002
- Food alert in bumblebees (Bombus terrestris): Possible mechanisms and evolutionary implications
2001
- Evolutionary origins of bee dances
1999