Sommer Stefan, von Beeren Christoph, Wehner Rüdiger
Institute of Zoology, University of Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zürich, Switzerland.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Jan 8;105(1):317-22. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0710157104. Epub 2007 Dec 26.
When offered a permanent food source, central Australian desert ants, Melophorus bagoti, develop individually distinct, view-based foraging routes, which they retrace with amazing accuracy during each foraging trip. Using a particular channel setup connected to an artificial feeder, we trained M. bagoti ants to either two or three inward routes that led through different parts of their maze-like foraging grounds. Here, we show that ants are able to adopt multiple habitual paths in succession and that they preserve initially acquired route memories even after they have been trained to new routes. Individual ants differ in the consistency with which they run along habitual pathways. However, those ants that follow constant paths retain their route-specific memories for at least 5 days of suspended foraging, which suggests that even multiple route memories, once acquired, are preserved over the entire lifetime of a forager.
当有永久食物源时,澳大利亚中部沙漠蚂蚁——巴氏墨胸蚁(Melophorus bagoti)会形成各自独特的、基于视野的觅食路线,并且在每次觅食行程中它们都能极其精确地原路返回。我们使用一种连接到人工喂食器的特定通道设置,训练巴氏墨胸蚁走两条或三条向内的路线,这些路线穿过它们迷宫般的觅食区域的不同部分。在这里,我们表明蚂蚁能够连续采用多条习惯路径,并且即使在被训练走新路线后,它们仍能保留最初获得的路线记忆。个体蚂蚁沿着习惯路径行走的一致性有所不同。然而,那些沿着固定路径行走的蚂蚁在至少5天的暂停觅食期间仍保留其特定路线记忆,这表明即使是多个路线记忆,一旦获得,在觅食者的整个生命周期中都会被保留。