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Visual image of neighbors to elicit wandering behavior in the soldier crab

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Abstract

The soldier crab appears in great numbers and feeds while wandering during daytime low tide. When they see an approaching object, they screw themselves into the sand. The mechanism of formation of mass wandering has not been clarified. In this study, to investigate if the soldier crabs use visual images of neighbors as a stimulus for wandering, dummy crabs were presented to crabs. In the experiments, one, two, four, or eight dummies were placed in a circle on a sand arena. Each crab was placed in the center of the arena and observed whether it burrowed into the sand or wandered. The proportions of wandering individuals in each experimental treatment were compared with the expected value. Significantly more crabs were wanderers when only two and four dummies were present. This result suggests that soldier crabs chose burrowing or wandering depending on visual image of the distribution of the neighbors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Bioengineering, Shinshu University, Ueda, Japan

    Toru Moriyama, Jun-ichi Mashiko & Toshinori Matsui

  2. Graduate School of Science and Technology, Niigata University, Niigata, Japan

    Koichiro Enomoto

  3. Graduate School of Science and Technology, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

    Tetsuya Matsui

  4. Collage of Systems Engineering and Science, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Kojiro Iizuka

  5. Center for Management of Information Technologies, Kumamoto University, Kumamoto, Japan

    Masashi Toda

  6. School of Fundamental Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

    Yukio Pegio Gunji

Authors
  1. Toru Moriyama
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  2. Jun-ichi Mashiko
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  3. Toshinori Matsui
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  4. Koichiro Enomoto
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  5. Tetsuya Matsui
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  6. Kojiro Iizuka
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  7. Masashi Toda
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  8. Yukio Pegio Gunji
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Toru Moriyama.

Additional information

This work was presented in part at the 1st International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics, Kyoto, Japan, October 28–30, 2015.

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Moriyama, T., Mashiko, Ji., Matsui, T. et al. Visual image of neighbors to elicit wandering behavior in the soldier crab. Artif Life Robotics 21, 247–252 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-016-0292-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-016-0292-7

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