Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects.
Biol Open. 2012 May 15;1(5):467-72. doi: 10.1242/bio.20121099. Epub 2012 Mar 30.
Noise is universal in information transfer. In animal communication, this presents a challenge not only for intended signal receivers, but also to biologists studying the system. In honey bees, a forager communicates to nestmates the location of an important resource via the waggle dance. This vibrational signal is composed of repeating units (waggle runs) that are then averaged by nestmates to derive a single vector. Manual dance decoding is a powerful tool for studying bee foraging ecology, although the process is time-consuming: a forager may repeat the waggle run 1- >100 times within a dance. It is impractical to decode all of these to obtain the vector; however, intra-dance waggle runs vary, so it is important to decode enough to obtain a good average. Here we examine the variation among waggle runs made by foraging bees to devise a method of dance decoding. The first and last waggle runs within a dance are significantly more variable than the middle run. There was no trend in variation for the middle waggle runs. We recommend that any four consecutive waggle runs, not including the first and last runs, may be decoded, and we show that this methodology is suitable by demonstrating the goodness-of-fit between the decoded vectors from our subsamples with the vectors from the entire dances.
噪声在信息传递中普遍存在。在动物通讯中，这不仅对预期的信号接收者构成了挑战，也对研究该系统的生物学家构成了挑战。在蜜蜂中，觅食者通过摇摆舞向巢内同伴传达重要资源的位置信息。这种振动信号由重复单元（摇摆运行）组成，然后由巢内同伴平均化，得出一个单一的向量。手动舞蹈解码是研究蜜蜂觅食生态学的有力工具，尽管这个过程很耗时：一只觅食者在一次舞蹈中可能会重复摇摆运行 1- >100 次。解码所有这些来获得向量是不切实际的；然而，舞蹈内的摇摆运行是有差异的，因此解码足够的数量以获得良好的平均值是很重要的。在这里，我们研究了觅食蜜蜂在摇摆运行中的差异，以设计一种舞蹈解码方法。舞蹈中第一和最后一个摇摆运行比中间的摇摆运行变化更大。中间摇摆运行的变化没有趋势。我们建议可以解码任何四个连续的摇摆运行，但不包括第一和最后一个运行，我们通过展示从我们的子样本中解码的向量与整个舞蹈的向量之间的拟合程度来证明这种方法的适用性。
