Data from: Ants determine their next move at rest, not on the fly

To find useful work to do for their colony, individual eusocial animals have to move, somehow staying attentive to relevant social information. Recent research on individual Temnothorax albipennis ants moving inside their colony’s nest found a power-law relationship between a movement’s duration and its average speed; and a universal speed profile for movements showing that they mostly fluctuate around a constant average speed. From this predictability it was inferred that movement durations are somehow determined before the movement itself. Here, we find similar results in lone T. albipennis ants exploring a large arena outside the nest, both when the arena is clean and when it contains pheromones from previous nestmates. This implies that these movement characteristics originate from the same individual neural and/or physiological mechanism(s), operating without immediate regard to social influences. However, the presence of pheromones was found to affect the inter-event speed correlations. Hence we suggest that ants’ motor planning results in intermittent response to the social environment: movement duration is adjusted in response to social information only between movements, not during them. This environmentally-flexible, intermittently responsive movement behaviour points toward a spatially allocated division of labour in this species. It also prompts more general questions on collective animal movement and the role of intermittent causality between organisational levels in the stability of complex systems.