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

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An Erratum to this article was published on 18 February 2009

Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A.E. Walsby and D. Holland for advice and help with weighing gasters; E. Franklin, R. Archer, Z. Demery, J. Green, B. Johnson, R. Matsuura, J. Roy, P. Sleeman, M.J.H. Steiner, M. Sullivan, J. Wood and A. Whitehead for experimental assistance; S. Perez-Espona, E.A. Langridge and N. Stroeymeyt for useful discussions. NRF & EJHR acknowledge EPSRC grant EP/D076226/1; ABS-F and TOR acknowledge EPSRC grant EP/E061796/1. The experiments described comply with the current laws of the country in which they were performed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University Research Centre for Behavioural Biology and Ant Lab, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UG, UK

    Elva J. H. Robinson, Thomas O. Richardson & Nigel R. Franks

  2. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, BIT, University of the West of England, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol, BS16 1QY, UK

    Thomas O. Richardson & Ana B. Sendova-Franks

  3. Computational Biology Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, 1275 York Avenue, Box 460, New York, NY, 10021, USA

    Ofer Feinerman

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  1. Elva J. H. Robinson
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  5. Nigel R. Franks
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Correspondence to Elva J. H. Robinson.

Additional information

Communicated by: M. Beekman

An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00265-009-0715-8

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Robinson, E.J.H., Richardson, T.O., Sendova-Franks, A.B. et al. Radio tagging reveals the roles of corpulence, experience and social information in ant decision making. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 63, 627–636 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-008-0696-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-008-0696-z

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