Self-Synchronization and Task Fulfilment in Social Insects

Some authors have hypothesized that the observed self-synchronized activity in ant colonies provides some adaptive advantages, and, in particular, it has been suggested that task realization may benefit from this ordered temporal pattern of behavior (Robinson, 1992; Hatcher et al., 1992). In this paper we couple models of self-synchronized activity (the Fluid Neural Network) and of regulation of division of labour (the Fixed Threshold Model) to suggest that with self-synchronized patterns of activity a task may be fulfilled more effectively than with random patterns of activity at the same average level of activity per individual.