Wehner Rüdiger, Boyer Martin, Loertscher Florian, Sommer Stefan, Menzi Ursula
Institute of Zoology, University of Zürich, Switzerland.
Curr Biol. 2006 Jan 10;16(1):75-9. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2005.11.035.
In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest and debate about whether social insects-central-place foragers such as bees and ants-acquire and use cognitive maps, which enable the animal to steer novel courses between familiar sites . Especially in honey bees, it has been claimed that these insects indeed possess such "general landscape memories" and use them in a "map-like" way . Here, we address this question in Australian desert ants, Melophorus bagoti, which forage within cluttered environments full of nearby and more distant landmarks. Within these environments, the ants establish landmark-based idiosyncratic routes from the nest to their feeding sites and select different one-way routes for their outbound and inbound journeys. Various types of displacement experiments show that inbound ants when hitting their inbound routes at any particular place immediately channel in and follow these routes until they reach the nest, but that they behave as though lost when hitting their habitual outbound routes. Hence, familiar landmarks are not decoupled from the context within which they have been acquired and are not knitted together in a more general and potentially map-like way. They instruct the ants when to do what rather than provide them with map-like information about their position in space.
近年来，关于社会性昆虫（如蜜蜂和蚂蚁这类中心地觅食者）是否获取并使用认知地图（认知地图能使动物在熟悉地点之间开辟新路线）的问题，引发了人们极大的兴趣和讨论。特别是对于蜜蜂，有人声称这些昆虫确实拥有这种“一般景观记忆”，并以“地图式”的方式加以运用。在此，我们以澳大利亚沙漠蚂蚁——巴氏墨胸蚁为研究对象来探讨这个问题，这种蚂蚁在充满远近地标物的杂乱环境中觅食。在这些环境中，蚂蚁会从巢穴到觅食地点建立基于地标的独特路线，并为往返行程选择不同的单向路线。各类移位实验表明，返程蚂蚁在任何特定地点踏上返程路线时，会立即进入并沿着这些路线返回巢穴，但当它们踏上惯常的出程路线时，却表现得好像迷失了方向。因此，熟悉的地标物并未与获取它们时的环境相分离，也没有以更一般化且可能类似地图的方式整合在一起。地标物指导蚂蚁何时做何事，而非为它们提供关于自身在空间中位置的类似地图的信息。
