期刊
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
卷 277, 期 1685, 页码 1267-1273出版社
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1976
关键词
ants; foraging; decision-making; leader; group recruitment
资金
- FRFC [2.4600.09]
- FRIA (Fonds pour la Recherche dans l'Industrie et dans l'Agriculture)
In the ant species Tetramorium caespitum, communication and foraging patterns rely on group-mass recruitment. Scouts having discovered food recruit nestmates and behave as leaders by guiding groups of recruits to the food location. After a while, a mass recruitment takes place in which foragers follow a chemical trail. Since group recruitment is crucial to the whole foraging process, we investigated whether food characteristics induce a tuning of recruiting stimuli by leaders that act upon the dynamics and size of recruited groups. High sucrose concentration triggers the exit of a higher number of groups that contain twice as many ants and reach the food source twice as fast than towards a weakly concentrated one. Similar trends were found depending on food accessibility: for a cut mealworm, accessibility to haemolymph results in a faster formation of larger groups than for an entire mealworm. These data provide the background for developing a stochastic model accounting for exploitation patterns by group-mass recruiting species. This model demonstrates how the modulations performed by leaders drive the colony to select the most profitable food source among several ones. Our results highlight how a minority of individuals can influence collective decisions in societies based on a distributed leadership.
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