Throughout March and April, we are featuring articles shortlisted for the 2024 Robert May Prize. The Robert May Prize is awarded by the British Ecological Society each year for the best paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution written by an early career author. Alba Motes Rodrigo’s article ‘Precise tactile stimulation of worker ants by a robotic manipulator reveals that individual responses are density- and context-dependent‘ is one of those shortlisted for the award.

The paper

What is your shortlisted paper about, and what are you seeking to answer with your research?  

With this project we were overall interested in assessing how context-specific factors influence ant behaviour. Specifically, we investigated how the task an ant is performing at a given point in time as well as the density of conspecifics around her, influence how she responds to external stimuli. This question is challenging to address experimentally because it requires both monitoring colony density as well as the ability to provide targeted stimulation to single ants. To overcome these challenges, together with my co-first author Dr. Matthias Rüegg, we built and implemented a robotic manipulation platform that allowed us to teleoperate a dummy inside ant colonies and to provide simulated antennations to ants performing different tasks in areas with different densities. We then paired this system with a custom-built automated tracking system that allowed us to track individual identities and locations over time.

Were you surprised by anything when working on it?  Did you have any challenges to overcome? 

I was surprised by how many different responses the ants had towards the dummy, specially by the fact that some ants climbed on top of it and “rode” it while it moved around. That was funny to watch.  

What is the next step in this field going to be?  

I think the combined use of machine learning and tracking technologies has a huge potential to uncover dynamics of animal groups that were unknown until now. I am excited to see all the new advances in the study of collective behaviour that will come out from the application of these new tools.  

What are the broader impacts or implications of your research for policy or practice?   

The results of our study very much constitute a novel advancement in our understanding of social insect biology. We hope that our system or systems of a similar design can be used to empirically investigate the effects of more complex stimuli on social insect behaviour. Such studies would have the potential to significantly further our understanding of decentralized collective systems. 

The author

How did you get involved in ecology?  

I started working on Ecology and Evolution during my undergrad. I spent a year as an Erasmus student at the University of Oslo investigating the relationship between body condition and song complexity in wild pied flycatchers and fell in love with the field.  Since then I have been working on different projects trying to understand the drivers and consequences of inter-individual behavioural variability within collectives. 

What is your current position? 

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Have you continued the research your paper is about? 

Partly. We used the tracking system in another project aiming to determine the degree of conservatism of social network structure among ant species (10.1098/rspb.2024.0898) 

What one piece of advice would you give to someone in your field?  

Diversify. Explore different research avenues and model systems. It is extremely helpful to have a broad understanding of the field in order to design, conduct and interpret studies.