Lee S-H, Bardunias P, Su N-Y
Department of Entomology and Nematology, Ft. Lauderdale Research and Education Center, University of Florida, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33314, United States.
Biosystems. 2007 Nov-Dec;90(3):802-7. doi: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2007.04.004. Epub 2007 May 1.
Subterranean termites excavate branching tunnels for searching and transporting food in soil. Experimentally, the length distribution of the branch tunnels, P(L), was characterized by the exponentially decaying function, P(L) approximately exp(-alphaL) with a branch length exponent of alpha=0.15. To evaluate the significance of this alpha value, we used a lattice model to simulate tunnels of the Formosan subterranean termite, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki in featureless soil and computed the ratio of energy gain for obtained food to loss for transporting food for a given time, gamma for various simulated tunnel patterns with the different values of alpha. In simulation, the gamma was maximized at 0.15<alpha<0.20 for the number of primary tunnels N=6, 8, and 10. Our results indicate that tunnels with branch length distributions similar to those derived from empirical tunnel patterns result in tunnels made up of highly efficient paths to search and transport resources.
地下白蚁在土壤中挖掘分支隧道用于搜寻和运输食物。通过实验，分支隧道的长度分布(P(L))由指数衰减函数(P(L)\approx\exp(-\alpha L))表征，分支长度指数(\alpha = 0.15)。为了评估这个(\alpha)值的意义，我们使用晶格模型在无特征土壤中模拟台湾乳白蚁（Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki）的隧道，并针对不同(\alpha)值的各种模拟隧道模式，计算在给定时间内获取食物的能量增益与运输食物的能量损失之比(\gamma)。在模拟中，对于主隧道数量(N = 6)、(8)和(10)，当(0.15 < \alpha < 0.20)时，(\gamma)达到最大值。我们的结果表明，具有与经验隧道模式相似的分支长度分布的隧道，会形成由高效搜寻和运输资源路径组成的隧道。
