Effect of interactions between harvester ants on forager decisions

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

Deborah M. Gordon¹  Roxana P Arauco-Aliaga¹  Jacob D Davidson²  Mark S Goldman²  Sam Crow³ 

[1] Stanford University;University of California, Davis;University of Washington;

关键词: decision-making;    collective behavior;    sequential sampling models;    integrator;    stochastic accumulator;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fevo.2016.00115

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Harvester ant colonies adjust their foraging activity to day-to-day changes in food availability and hour-to-hour changes in environmental conditions. This collective behavior is regulated through interactions, in the form of brief antennal contacts, between outgoing foragers and returning foragers with food. Here we consider how an ant, waiting in the entrance chamber just inside the nest entrance, uses its accumulated experience of interactions to decide whether to leave the nest to forage.Using videos of field observations, we tracked the interactions and foraging decisions of ants in the entrance chamber. Outgoing foragers tended to interact with returning foragers at higher rates than ants that returned to the deeper nest and did not forage. To provide a mechanistic framework for interpreting these results, we develop a decision model in which ants make decisions based upon a noisy accumulation of individual contacts with returning foragers.The model can reproduce core trends and realistic distributions for individual ant interaction statistics, and suggests possible mechanisms by which foraging activity may be regulated at an individual ant level.

【 授权许可】

Unknown