Holbrook C Tate
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA.
Cold Spring Harb Protoc. 2009 Jul;2009(7):pdb.prot5240. doi: 10.1101/pdb.prot5240.
Ant societies are tractable and malleable, two features that make them ideal models for probing the organization of complex biological systems. The ability to identify specific individuals while they function as part of a colony permits an integrative analysis of social complexity, including self-organizational processes (i.e., how individual-level properties and social interactions give rise to emergent, colony-level attributes such as division of labor and collective decision making). Effects of genotype, nutrition, and physiology on individual behavior and the organization of work also can be investigated in this manner, through correlative and manipulative approaches. Moreover, aspects of colony demography (e.g., colony size, and age and size distributions of workers) can be altered experimentally to examine colony development and regulatory mechanisms underlying colony homeostasis and resiliency. This protocol describes how to sample the behavior of ants living in a colony under laboratory conditions. Specifically, it outlines how to identify and observe individuals within a colony, an approach that can be used to quantify individual- and colony-level patterns of behavior. When a lower-resolution measure of overall group behavior is desired, individual identities might not be required. Given the diversity of ants and their study, this protocol provides a very general methodology; the details can be modified according to the body size, colony size, and ecology of the focal species, as well as to specific research aims. These basic techniques can also be extended to more advanced experimental designs such as manipulation of colony demography and hormone treatment.
蚁群易于研究且具有可塑性，这两个特性使其成为探究复杂生物系统组织的理想模型。在个体作为蚁群一部分发挥作用时识别特定个体的能力，使得对社会复杂性进行综合分析成为可能，包括自组织过程（即个体层面的特性和社会互动如何产生诸如分工和集体决策等涌现的蚁群层面的属性）。通过相关和操纵性方法，还可以以此方式研究基因型、营养和生理对个体行为及工作组织的影响。此外，可以通过实验改变蚁群人口统计学的各个方面（例如蚁群大小以及工蚁的年龄和大小分布），以研究蚁群发育以及蚁群稳态和恢复力背后的调节机制。本方案描述了在实验室条件下如何对生活在蚁群中的蚂蚁行为进行采样。具体而言，它概述了如何识别和观察蚁群中的个体，这种方法可用于量化个体和蚁群层面的行为模式。当需要对整体群体行为进行较低分辨率的测量时，可能不需要识别个体身份。鉴于蚂蚁种类及其研究的多样性，本方案提供了一种非常通用的方法；细节可根据目标物种的体型、蚁群大小和生态以及具体研究目的进行修改。这些基本技术还可以扩展到更高级的实验设计，如操纵蚁群人口统计学和激素处理。
