Social organisms express collaborative behaviors, allowing them to solve problems that exceed their individual capabilities. Group coordination and environmental context are some of the factors that may determine the performance of individual and collaborative strategies. Using the trail‐clearing behavior of leaf‐cutting ants, we evaluated experimentally for both strategies whether the success probability and clearing time depend on problem characteristics and context. We placed obstacles of different sizes and shapes (problem characteristics), in trails with different foragers' fluxes and soil roughness (context) in 10 field nests of Atta cephalotes, and compared removal success (i.e., if ants could remove obstacles) and time of individual and collaborative strategies. Very large obstacles could only be removed collaboratively, confirming individual limitations for transporting large objects. For all obstacle shapes, collaborative removals were more successful but took longer, suggesting that coordination among individuals delays these actions. Individual strategies were faster, regardless of ant flux. However, as ant flux increased, removal success was higher for collaborative than for individual removals. Lastly, trail roughness had no effect. This work highlights one advantage of sociality, the option of collaboratively solving problems that exceed the individual abilities. In addition, it reveals the associated costs of joint actions, since they can be time‐consuming presumably due to coordination problems.

中文翻译：

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在我的朋友的帮助下：切叶蚂蚁清理足迹期间的个人协作表现

社会有机体表达协作行为，使他们能够解决超出自身能力的问题。团队协作和环境背景是可能决定个人策略和协作策略绩效的一些因素。利用切叶蚁的清除行为，我们通过实验评估了两种策略的成功概率和清除时间是否取决于问题特征和环境。我们将不同大小和形状（问题特征）的障碍物放置在10个野头足field巢中具有不同觅食者通量和土壤粗糙度（背景）的小径中，并比较了移除成功（即，如果蚂蚁可以移除障碍物）和个体合作策略的时间。只能通力协作清除非常大的障碍，这确认了运输大型物体的个别限制。对于所有障碍物形状，协同清除效果更佳，但花费的时间更长，这表明个人之间的协调会延迟这些操作。无论蚂蚁流量如何，个体策略都更快。但是，随着蚂蚁通量的增加，协作去除的成功率要高于单个去除的成功率。最后，拖尾粗糙度没有影响。这项工作凸显了社交性的一个优势，即协作解决超出个人能力的问题的选择。此外，它还揭示了联合行动的相关成本，