Featured In: Academia News
Swarms of bees and brain neurons make decisions using strikingly similar mechanisms, reports a new study in the Dec. 9 issue of Science.
In previous work, Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley clarified
how scout bees in a honeybee swarm perform “waggle dances” to prompt
other scout bees to inspect a promising site that has been found.
In the new study, Seeley, a professor of neurobiology and behavior,
reports with five colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom
that scout bees also use inhibitory “stop signals” – a short buzz
delivered with a head butt to the dancer – to inhibit the waggle dances
produced by scouts advertising competing sites. The strength of the
inhibition produced by each group of scouts is proportional to the
group’s size. This inhibitory signaling helps ensure that only one of
the sites is chosen. This is especially important for reaching a
decision when two sites are equally good, Seeley said.
Previous research has shown that bees use stop signals to warn
nest-mates about such dangers as attacks at a food source. However, this
is the first study to show the use of stop signals in house-hunting
decisions. Such use of stop signals in decision making is “analogous to
how the nervous system works in complex brains,” said Seeley. “The brain
has similar cross inhibitory signaling between neurons in
decision-making circuits.”
Co-authors Patrick Hogan and James Marshall of the University of
Sheffield in the United Kingdom explored the implications of the bees’
cross-inhibitory signaling by modeling their collective decision-making
process. Their analysis showed that stop signaling helps bees to break
deadlocks between two equally good sites and to avoid costly dithering.
The study was funded by the Cornell Agricultural Experiment Station,
the University of California-Riverside and the U.K. Biotechnology and
Biological Sciences Research Council.
Source: Cornell University
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