Behavioural variation among workers promotes feed-forward loops in a simulated insect colony

Coordinated responses in eusocial insect colonies arise from worker interaction networks that enable collective processing of ecologically relevant information. Previous studies have detected a structural motif in these networks known as the feed-forward loop, which functions to process information in other biological regulatory networks (e.g., transcriptional networks). However, the processes that generate feed-forward loops among workers and the consequences for information flow within the colony remain largely unexplored. We constructed an agent-based model to investigate how individual variation in activity and movement shaped production of feed-forward loops in a simulated insect colony. We hypothesised that individual variation along these axes would generate feed-forward loops by driving variation in interaction frequency among workers. We found that among-individual variation in activity drove overrepresentation of feed-forward loops in the interaction networks by determining th...