Paying for information: partial loads in central place foragers
Paying for information: partial loads in central place foragers
复制标题
DOI：
10.1007/s00265-006-0246-5
复制
发表时间：
2006-11-01
影响因子：
2.3
通讯作者：
McNamara, J. M.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Dornhaus, A.;Collins, E. J.;McNamara, J. M.
有关食物来源的信息对觅食动物的成功至关重要。我们预测，这将影响群居觅食者的觅食决策，这可能会牺牲短期觅食效率，以更频繁地收集信息。这一结果来自一个中心位置觅食者的模型，该模型可能会接收关于中心位置最新可用的高级食物来源的信息。如果可能获得关于是否存在足够有价值的食物来源的信息，这种觅食者预计会提前从食物来源返回，即使只有部分负载。带着不完整的负载返回意味着觅食者在那个点上没有达到最大可能的食物递送速度。然而，这种部分负荷可以通过更早地开发更好的食物来源来弥补。我们的模型没有假设合作觅食，因此可以用来研究任何社会中心位置觅食者的这种影响。我们用蜜蜂和切叶蚂蚁的数值计算说明了这种方法，它们合作觅食。然而，对于这些例子，我们的结果表明，就接收信息而言，减少负载带来的好处微乎其微。此外，觅食者减少负荷量以更快地提供信息(而不是接收信息)的假设更符合社会性昆虫的经验数据。因此，我们可以得出结论，在这两个群居昆虫觅食的案例中，成功的觅食者有效地分发信息可能比失败的觅食者有效地收集信息更重要。
Information about food sources can be crucial to the success of a foraging animal. We predict that this will influence foraging decisions by group-living foragers, which may sacrifice short-term foraging efficiency to collect information more frequently. This result emerges from a model of a central-place forager that can potentially receive information on newly available superior food sources at the central place. Such foragers are expected to return early from food sources, even with just partial loads, if information about the presence of sufficiently valuable food sources is likely to become available. Returning with an incomplete load implies that the forager is at that point not achieving the maximum possible food delivery rate. However, such partial loading can be more than compensated for by an earlier exploitation of a superior food source. Our model does not assume cooperative foraging and could thus be used to investigate this effect for any social central-place forager. We illustrate the approach using numerical calculations for honeybees and leafcutter ants, which do forage cooperatively. For these examples, however, our results indicate that reducing load confers minimal benefits in terms of receiving information. Moreover, the hypothesis that foragers reduce load to give information more quickly (rather than to receive it) fits empirical data from social insects better. Thus, we can conclude that in these two cases of social-insect foraging, efficient distribution of information by successful foragers may be more important than efficient collection of information by unsuccessful ones.