Food transport in ants: Do Lasius niger foragers maximize their individual load?
نویسندگان
چکیده
The decision for a Lasius niger forager to lay a chemical trail and launch recruitment to a food source is governed by an internal individual threshold. The value of this threshold triggering chemical communication is not set by the maximal capacity of the crop. Actually, trail-laying ants are still able to drink additional food encountered on their homeward journey. The partial filling of the crop by trail-laying ants may be a means for the ants to shorten foraging trips and to speed up the information updating within the nest. Moreover, by partially filling their crop, foragers keep a potential for sampling resources and for tasting other encountered food sources.
منابع مشابه
Triggering and persistence of trail-laying in foragers of the ant Lasius niger.
In the ant Lasius niger, the ability to ingest their own desired volume is the key criterion that rules the recruiting behaviour of scouts. This volume acts as a threshold triggering the trail-laying response of foragers. In this paper, we show that this desired volume is specific to each individual and is kept constant over successive trips to a food source. This individual specificity contras...
متن کاملHow do ants assess food volume?
By comparing the behaviour of Lasius niger scouts at sucrose droplets of different volumes, we empirically identified the criterion used by each scout to assess the amount of food available as well as the rules governing its decision to lay a recruitment trail. When scouts discovered food volumes exceeding the capacity of their crop (3 or 6 µl), 90% immediately returned to the nest laying a rec...
متن کاملOut of sight but not out of mind: modulation of recruitment according to home range marking in ants
Animals can acquire a global knowledge about their environment that exceeds their individual capacities by estimating the local density and activity of nestmates in an area. In ants, home range marking can indicate the density and activity of nestmates, allowing scouts to assess the potential interest of the area as a foraging site. We investigated how home range marking through footprints infl...
متن کاملAnt foraging on complex trails: route learning and the role of trail pheromones in Lasius niger.
Ants are central place foragers and use multiple information sources to navigate between the nest and feeding sites. Individual ants rapidly learn a route, and often prioritize memory over pheromone trails when tested on a simple trail with a single bifurcation. However, in nature, ants often forage at locations that are reached via more complex routes with multiple trail bifurcations. Such rou...
متن کاملNegative Feedback Enables Fast and Flexible Collective Decision-Making in Ants
Positive feedback plays a major role in the emergence of many collective animal behaviours. In many ants pheromone trails recruit and direct nestmate foragers to food sources. The strong positive feedback caused by trail pheromones allows fast collective responses but can compromise flexibility. Previous laboratory experiments have shown that when the environment changes, colonies are often una...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
- Comptes rendus biologies
دوره 332 5 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2009