Radio tagging reveals the roles of corpulence, experience and social information in ant decision making

By E. Robinson, T. O. Richardson, Ana B. Sendova-Franks, Ofer Feinerman, Nigel R. Franks. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2009

125 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ant colonies are factories within fortresses (Oster and Wilson 1978). They run on resources foraged from an outside world fraught with danger. On what basis do individual ants decide to leave the safety of the nest? We investigated the relative roles of social information (returning nestmates), individual experience and physiology (lipid stores/corpulence) in predicting which ants leave the nest and when. We monitored Temnothorax albipennis workers individually using passive radio-frequency identification technology, a novel procedure as applied to ants. This method allowed the matching of individual corpulence measurements to activity patterns of large numbers of individuals over several days. Social information and physiology are both good predictors of when an ant leaves the nest. Positive feedback from social information causes bouts of activity at the colony level. When certain social information is removed from the system by preventing ants returning, physiology best predicts which ants leave the nest and when. Individual experience is strongly related to physiology. A small number of lean individuals are responsible for most external trips. An individual’s nutrient status could be a useful cue in division of labour, especially when public information from other ants is unavailable.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef7ae064298c983653b551b895f0efd6eed02931

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. I. Pen
2. Franz J. Weissing
3. Laurent Keller
4. R. Gold
5. S. Cook
6. M. Eubanks
7. S. Behmer
8. Olof Leimar

In Genetics

1. Laurent Keller
2. Franz J. Weissing
3. I. Pen
4. R. Gold
5. S. Cook
6. M. Eubanks
7. S. Behmer
8. Olof Leimar

Citations in the corpus

• Colony-level macronutrient regulation in ants: mechanisms, hoarding and associated costs (2010, background): “…and including worker age (reviewed in Robson & Beshers 1997), perceived life expectancy (Moron et al. 2008), social interactions (Robinson et al. 2009) and individual physiological condition, most notably body lipid reserves (O’Donnell & Jeanne 1995; Blanchard et al. 2000; Robinson et al. 2009).”
• An Evolutionary Perspective on Self-Organized Division of Labor in Social Insects (2011, background): “Worker size and morphology correlate with worker behavior in almost all species in which this has been studied (e.g., Detrain & Pasteels 1991, Robinson et al. 2009a, Wilson 1980).”