Anna Dornhaus

Frequent errors are the worst: robustness to individual failures in collective foraging

This study examines how individual errors affect collective foraging in social insects and finds that communication enhances exploration and mitigates error impacts.

Persist or Give up? Fire ants motivated to search for a high-quality food source even if they don't know how to find it

This study shows that fire ants rely on pheromone trails to find food and abandon resources when trails are disrupted, but persist more with high-quality food.

Bumble bees that follow a stricter routine innovate less: Foraging behaviors, environmental complexity, and how they relate to novel problem solving

This study shows that bumble bees in complex environments take longer to find novel flowers, while foraging traits like speed and routine formation predict innovation success.

Optimal competitors: the balance of attraction and choices of mutualists, like pollinators, drives facilitation and may promote crop pollination

The paper mathematically examines how facilitation and competition in consumer attraction can arise from imbalances between local competition and joint long-distance attraction, with implications for crop pollination.

A comparison of turn identification methods on high-frequency movement trajectories reveals potential comparability issues between studies of movement ecology

This study compares turn identification methods on movement trajectories, finding large accuracy differences and advising caution in comparing results across methods.

Inexperienced bumble bees are poor at securely landing regardless of flower orientation or presence of labellum

This study shows inexperienced bumble bees often fail to land on flowers, regardless of flower orientation or labellum presence, highlighting the role of experience in landing success.

Stop and go: exploring alternative mechanisms for task allocation in social insects - response and satisfaction thresholds trade off cost, accuracy, and speed differently

This paper models different task-allocation mechanisms in social insects, showing how response, satisfaction, and composite thresholds trade off speed, cost, and accuracy in task allocation.