What counts for ants? How return behaviour and food search of Cataglyphis ants are modified by variations in food quantity and experience
What counts for ants? How return behaviour and food search of Cataglyphis ants are modified by variations in food quantity and experience
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DOI：
10.1242/jeb.071761
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发表时间：
2012-09-01
影响因子：
2.8
通讯作者：
Wolf, Harald
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bolek, Siegfried;Wittlinger, Matthias;Wolf, Harald
当发现的食物多于人们能够带回家的食物时，人们是否应该返回现场进一步利用它？这个问题对于中心觅食者来说至关重要，因为它们为巢穴或巢穴提供了家园。必须权衡返回的好处与在其他地方找到食物的机会和可用资源的可能性。沙漠蚂蚁 Cataglyphis fortis 是在巢穴和觅食区之间来回导航的经过充分研究的例子，因为它们主要依赖于开放且无特色的沙漠栖息地中的路径整合。蚂蚁利用路径整合不仅是为了从觅食之旅中安全返回，也是为了将来返回充足的觅食地点。从先前产出过食物的巢穴出发的方向是未来觅食旅行的首选方向，这种现象被称为扇区保真度。是什么促使蚂蚁返回特定地点，以及它们如何忠实地寻找那个地方，尚未得到充分研究。我们通过改变喂食器中食物的数量和在测试返回喂食地点的觅食者的搜索距离之前访问喂食器的次数来检查通道实验中食物来源的评估。蚂蚁在第一次回访时表现出更集中的搜索丰富的食物来源，而不是只有很少食物的来源。经过几次成功的访问后，蚂蚁总是彻底寻找食物来源，而不管提供的食物数量如何。因此，沙漠蚂蚁既考虑食物的丰富性，又考虑食物遭遇的可靠性，对可靠性的确证学习逐渐取代了最初对充足饲养者的偏好。蚂蚁似乎用食物的密度来衡量食物的丰富度。在我们的分析层面，在实验通道中进行的搜索与在开阔的沙漠地形中进行的搜索没有什么区别。目前的结果不仅展示了经过充分研究的沙漠蚂蚁如何评估产量和食物来源可靠性的经验，而且还为未来研究如何利用逐项食物来源建立了模型系统。
When finding more food than one is able to carry home, should one come back to the site to exploit it further? This question is crucial for central place foragers that provide for a home place with brood or nest mates. The benefit of returning has to be weighed against the chance of finding food elsewhere and the resources available. Desert ants Cataglyphis fortis are well-studied examples when it comes to navigating back and forth between their nest and a foraging area, due to their primary reliance on path integration in the open and featureless desert habitat. The ants use path integration not only for a safe return from their foraging trips but also for future returns to plentiful feeding sites. The direction from the nest that has previously yielded food items is preferred for future foraging trips, a phenomenon termed sector fidelity. What prompts the ants to return to a particular site, and how faithfully they search for that place, has not been well studied. We examine the evaluation of food sources in channel experiments by varying both the number of food items in a feeder and the number of visits to the feeder before testing search distances of foragers returning to the feeding site. Ants exhibited more focused searches for plentiful food sources than for sources with only few food items upon their first return visit. After several successful visits, the ants always searched thoroughly for the food source, independent of the amount of food offered. Thus, desert ants consider both food abundance and reliability of food encounter, with corroborative learning of reliability gradually overriding the initial preference for plentiful feeders. The density of food items appears to be used by the ants as a proxy for food abundance. On the level of our analysis, the searches performed in the experimental channels are indistinguishable from those performed in the open desert terrain. The present results not only demonstrate how otherwise well-studied desert ants assess yield and experience with reliability of food sources, but also establish a model system for future study of how itemised food sources are exploited.