Navigational Efficiency of Nocturnal Myrmecia Ants Suffers at Low Light Levels
Navigational Efficiency of Nocturnal Myrmecia Ants Suffers at Low Light Levels
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0058801
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发表时间：
2013-03-06
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Raderschall, Chloe A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Narendra, Ajay;Reid, Samuel F.;Raderschall, Chloe A.
昆虫面临着在明亮的阳光照射和昏暗的环境中导航到特定目标的挑战。昼行性昆虫和夜行性昆虫使用非常相似的导航策略。这是尽管导航线索的信噪比在低光条件下很差。为了更好地了解夜间生活的演变，我们调查了夜间蚂蚁，Myrmopyryiformis的导航效率，在不同的光照水平。工人M。在黄昏的微光中，梨形虫会在狭窄的光窗中单独离开巢穴，在巢特有的桉树上觅食。大多数觅食者在黎明时分返回巢穴，而很少有人试图在整个晚上返回巢穴。我们发现，随着光照水平的下降，蚂蚁停留的时间更长，走得更慢，找到巢穴的成功率降低，它们的路径变得不那么直。我们发现，在明亮和黑暗的条件下，蚂蚁主要依赖于视觉地标信息的导航和地标的指导变得不太可靠，在低光条件下。这可能是由于在低光照水平下的导航效率差，大多数觅食者将导航任务限制在黄昏时期，在那里仍然可以获得足够的导航信息。
Insects face the challenge of navigating to specific goals in both bright sun-lit and dim-lit environments. Both diurnal and nocturnal insects use quite similar navigation strategies. This is despite the signal-to-noise ratio of the navigational cues being poor at low light conditions. To better understand the evolution of nocturnal life, we investigated the navigational efficiency of a nocturnal ant, Myrmecia pyriformis, at different light levels. Workers of M. pyriformis leave the nest individually in a narrow light-window in the evening twilight to forage on nest-specific Eucalyptus trees. The majority of foragers return to the nest in the morning twilight, while few attempt to return to the nest throughout the night. We found that as light levels dropped, ants paused for longer, walked more slowly, the success in finding the nest reduced and their paths became less straight. We found that in both bright and dark conditions ants relied predominantly on visual landmark information for navigation and that landmark guidance became less reliable at low light conditions. It is perhaps due to the poor navigational efficiency at low light levels that the majority of foragers restrict navigational tasks to the twilight periods, where sufficient navigational information is still available.