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A technological approach to the description of group foraging in the ant Myrmica rubra

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Abstract

Group foraging in Myrmica rubra ants is considered as a cyclic process in which transition from one phase to another is determined by summation of actions of individual ants inside the nest and in the foraging territory. In its turn, individual behavior is considered as a labile sequence of tasks, such as territory exploration, acquiring and transportation of food, the completeness of the sequence depending on the individual experience. Data on foraging of three experimental M. rubra colonies were represented as a relational database in MS Access 2007, and the database tools were used to study the interrelated characteristics of the two levels of the foraging process (group and individual) and to analyze the quantitative parameters of individual and group behavior.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zoological Museum, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, 125009, Russia

    E. B. Fedoseeva

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  1. E. B. Fedoseeva
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Correspondence to E. B. Fedoseeva.

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Original Russian Text © E.B. Fedoseeva, 2015, published in Zoologicheskii Zhurnal, 2015, Vol. 94, No. 10, pp. 1163–1178.

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Fedoseeva, E.B. A technological approach to the description of group foraging in the ant Myrmica rubra . Entmol. Rev. 95, 984–999 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0013873815080060

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