Data from: Meat ants cut more trail shortcuts when facing long detours

Engineered paths increase efficiency and safety but also incur
construction and maintenance costs, leading to a trade-off between
investment and gain. Such a trade-off is faced by Australian meat ants,
which create and maintain vegetation-free trails between nests and food
sources, and thus their trails are expected to be constructed selectively.
To test this, we placed an artificial obstacle consisting of 300 paper
grass blades between a sucrose feeder and the colony, flanked by walls of
either 10 or 80cm length. To exploit the feeder, ants could detour around
the walls or take a direct route by traversing through the obstacle. We
found that, when confronted with a long alternative detour, 75% of
colonies removed more grass blades and ants were also 60% more likely to
traverse the obstacle instead of detouring. An analysis of cut patterns
revealed that ants did not cut randomly, but instead concentrated on
creating a trail to the food source. Meat ants were thus able to
collectively deploy their trail clearing efforts in a directed manner when
detour costs were high, and rapidly established cleared trails to the food
source by focussing on completing a vertically aligned trail which is then
followed by the ants.