Experience, corpulence and decision making in ant foraging
Experience, corpulence and decision making in ant foraging
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DOI：
10.1242/jeb.071076
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发表时间：
2012-08-01
影响因子：
2.8
通讯作者：
Franks, Nigel R.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Robinson, Elva J. H.;Feinerman, Ofer;Franks, Nigel R.
社会群体是由其成员的决定构成的。社会性昆虫通常分工：一些决定留在巢中，而另一些则为殖民地觅食。个人在决定是否觅食时可能使用的两个信息来源是他们自己最近任务表现的经验和他们自己的生理学，例如。G.脂肪储备（肥胖）。前者主要是个人信息;后者可以显示整个殖民地的食物储备。这些因素很难分开，因为通常更瘦的个体也更有经验的觅食者。我们设计了一个实验，以确定是否觅食专业化是生理或经验为基础（或两者兼而有之）。我们发明了一个由无线电标签信息控制的自动门系统，以操纵任务访问并将这两个信息源解耦。我们的研究结果表明，当信息从肥胖和最近的经验冲突，蚂蚁的行为只根据他们的肥胖。然而，在蚂蚁生理上倾向于饲料（不太肥胖的蚂蚁），最近的成功经验积极影响他们的倾向再次觅食。因此，觅食是通过个体之间的长期生理差异组织起来的，从而产生相对稳定的反应阈值分布，并通过短期学习过程进行微调。通过这些简单的规则，蚁群可以灵活而有力地组织它们的觅食活动。
Social groups are structured by the decisions of their members. Social insects typically divide labour: some decide to stay in the nest while others forage for the colony. Two sources of information individuals may use when deciding whether to forage are their own experience of recent task performance and their own physiology, e. g. fat reserves (corpulence). The former is primarily personal information; the latter may give an indication of the food reserves of the whole colony. These factors are hard to separate because typically leaner individuals are also more experienced foragers. We designed an experiment to determine whether foraging specialisation is physiological or experience based (or both). We invented a system of automatic doors controlled by radio-tag information to manipulate task access and decouple these two sources of information. Our results show that when information from corpulence and recent experience conflict, ants behave only in accordance with their corpulence. However, among ants physiologically inclined to forage (less corpulent ants), recent experience of success positively influenced their propensity to forage again. Hence, foraging is organised via long-term physiological differences among individuals resulting in a relatively stable response threshold distribution, with fine-tuning provided by short-term learning processes. Through these simple rules, colonies can organise their foraging effort both robustly and flexibly.