期刊
PLOS BIOLOGY
卷 10, 期 9, 页码 -出版社
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001392
关键词
-
资金
- Wellcome Trust
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [BB/F52765X/1]
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [BBS/E/C/00005195, BB/F52765X/1, BBS/E/C/00004970] Funding Source: researchfish
- BBSRC [BB/F52765X/1, BBS/E/C/00004970, BBS/E/C/00005195] Funding Source: UKRI
Central place foragers, such as pollinating bees, typically develop circuits (traplines) to visit multiple foraging sites in a manner that minimizes overall travel distance. Despite being taxonomically widespread, these routing behaviours remain poorly understood due to the difficulty of tracking the foraging history of animals in the wild. Here we examine how bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) develop and optimise traplines over large spatial scales by setting up an array of five artificial flowers arranged in a regular pentagon (50 m side length) and fitted with motion-sensitive video cameras to determine the sequence of visitation. Stable traplines that linked together all the flowers in an optimal sequence were typically established after a bee made 26 foraging bouts, during which time only about 20 of the 120 possible routes were tried. Radar tracking of selected flights revealed a dramatic decrease by 80% (ca. 1500 m) of the total travel distance between the first and the last foraging bout. When a flower was removed and replaced by a more distant one, bees engaged in localised search flights, a strategy that can facilitate the discovery of a new flower and its integration into a novel optimal trapline. Based on these observations, we developed and tested an iterative improvement heuristic to capture how bees could learn and refine their routes each time a shorter route is found. Our findings suggest that complex dynamic routing problems can be solved by small-brained animals using simple learning heuristics, without the need for a cognitive map.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据