Mailleux Anne-Catherine, Detrain Claire, Deneubourg Jean-Louis
Unit of Social Ecology, Free University of Brussels, Brussels B-1050, Belgium.
J Exp Biol. 2006 Nov;209(Pt 21):4224-9. doi: 10.1242/jeb.02461.
The decision for an ant forager to launch recruitment is governed by an internal response threshold. Here, we demonstrate that this threshold (the desired volume) triggering trail-laying increases under starvation. As a consequence, highly starved foragers lay a recruitment trail and bring back to the nest higher quantities of food from large unlimited resources. In contrast, when the volume of the food source is under their crop capacity, the percentage of trail-communicating foragers is lower following a prolonged period of starvation. Such starvation-dependent changes in the "desired volume" threshold explain how ants optimize recruitment and select liquid food resources in order to prevent collective exploitation of low profitability.
蚂蚁觅食者决定发起招募行为受内部反应阈值的控制。在此，我们证明，引发留下踪迹行为的这个阈值（期望体积）在饥饿状态下会升高。因此，极度饥饿的觅食者会留下招募踪迹，并从大量无限制的资源中带回更多食物回巢。相比之下，当食物源的体积在它们嗉囊容量之下时，经过长时间饥饿后，进行踪迹交流的觅食者比例较低。“期望体积”阈值中这种依赖饥饿的变化解释了蚂蚁如何优化招募行为并选择液体食物资源，以防止对低收益资源的集体过度开发。
