Journal
BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY
Volume 19, Issue 5, Pages 984-989Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/beheco/arn057
Keywords
Cataglyphis; heuristic; optimal foraging; sector fidelity
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Funding
- Research Center for Mathematical Modelling in Bielefeld
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The desert ant Cataglyphis exhibits a strong tendency toward returning to its previous foraging direction when the last foraging run was successful. This behavior is called sector fidelity. A very simple behavioral rule, the tau-rule, has previously been identified as the possible underlying mechanism. Up to now, sector fidelity has been considered a means of facilitating navigation by exploiting familiar landmark information. We propose that sector fidelity enhances the foraging success of ants or other animals in an environment with a heterogeneous resource distribution. We tested the tau-rule and another promising behavioral rule in a very simple environment and modeled the foraging success of these strategies. For each condition, the parameters of the 2 heuristics were optimized using an evolutionary algorithm. The results of our simulations show that the tau-rule performs very well under different resource distributions and availabilities. It can therefore function as a very general adaptive foraging strategy for finding prey in landscapes with heterogeneous resource distributions.
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