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Context-dependent navigation in a collectively foraging species of ant, Messor cephalotes

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Abstract

More than 100 years of scientific research has provided evidence for sophisticated navigational mechanisms in social insects. One key role for navigation in ants is the orientation of workers between food sources and the nest. The focus of recent work has been restricted to navigation in individually foraging ant species, yet many species do not forage entirely independently, instead relying on collectively maintained information such as persistent trail networks and/or pheromones. Harvester ants use such networks, but additionally, foragers often search individually for food either side of trails. In the absence of a trail, these ‘off-trail’ foragers must navigate independently to relocate the trail and return to the nest. To investigate the strategies used by ants on and off the main trails, we conducted field experiments with a harvester ant species, Messor cephalotes, by transferring on-trail and off-trail foragers to an experimental arena. We employed custom-built software to track and analyse ant trajectories in the arena and to quantitatively compare behaviour. Our results indicate that foragers navigate using different cues depending on whether they are travelling on or off the main trails. We argue that navigation in collectively foraging ants deserves more attention due to the potential for behavioural flexibility arising from the relative complexity of journeys between food and the nest.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Iain Couzin, Daniel Rubenstein, Tanya Berger-Wolf and Jason Leigh for helpful discussion in the field and Iain Couzin, Robert Pringle and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on the manuscript. This work was a part of the project performed in the joined Princeton-UIC Field Computational Ecology course in Spring 2012 (http://www.cs.uic.edu/bin/view/ComputationalEcology), with co-instructors Tanya Berger-Wolf and Jason Leigh (University of Illinois at Chicago), Daniel Rubenstein and Iain Couzin (Princeton University), who were instrumental in several parts of this research. We thank the staff at Mpala Resarch Centre (Kenya), Ol’ Pejeta Nature Conservancy (Kenya), and fellow graduate students at EEB-Princeton University, CS at University of Illinois at Chicago, and University of Nairobi. Funding was provided by the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of Princeton University, NSF OCI-1152895 “EAGER: Field Computational Ecology Course” (Berger-Wolf and Rubenstein), NSF IIS-0747369 (Berger-Wolf) and NSF OCI-0943559 (Leigh).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, 106A Guyot Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544-2016, USA

    C. Offord

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, 851 Morgan (M/C 152), Rm 1120 SEO, Chicago, IL, 60607-7053, USA

    K. Reda & V. Mateevitsi

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  1. C. Offord
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Correspondence to C. Offord.

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Offord, C., Reda, K. & Mateevitsi, V. Context-dependent navigation in a collectively foraging species of ant, Messor cephalotes . Insect. Soc. 60, 361–368 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-013-0301-y

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