Mosqueiro Thiago, Cook Chelsea, Huerta Ramon, Gadau Jürgen, Smith Brian, Pinter-Wollman Noa
BioCircuits Institute, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA.
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
R Soc Open Sci. 2017 Aug 30;4(8):170344. doi: 10.1098/rsos.170344. eCollection 2017 Aug.
Variation in behaviour among group members often impacts collective outcomes. Individuals may vary both in the task that they perform and in the persistence with which they perform each task. Although both the distribution of individuals among tasks and differences among individuals in behavioural persistence can each impact collective behaviour, we do not know if and how they jointly affect collective outcomes. Here, we use a detailed computational model to examine the joint impact of colony-level distribution among tasks and behavioural persistence of individuals, specifically their fidelity to particular resource sites, on the collective trade-off between exploring for new resources and exploiting familiar ones. We developed an agent-based model of foraging honeybees, parametrized by data from five colonies, in which we simulated scouts, who search the environment for new resources, and individuals who are recruited by the scouts to the newly found resources, i.e. recruits. We varied the persistence of returning to a particular food source of both scouts and recruits and found that, for each value of persistence, there is a different optimal ratio of scouts to recruits that maximizes resource collection by the colony. Furthermore, changes to the persistence of scouts induced opposite effects from changes to the persistence of recruits on the collective foraging of the colony. The proportion of scouts that resulted in the most resources collected by the colony decreased as the persistence of recruits increased. However, this optimal proportion of scouts increased as the persistence of scouts increased. Thus, behavioural persistence and task participation can interact to impact a colony's collective behaviour in orthogonal directions. Our work provides new insights and generates new hypotheses into how variations in behaviour at both the individual and colony levels jointly impact the trade-off between exploring for new resources and exploiting familiar ones.
群体成员之间行为的差异往往会影响集体成果。个体在执行的任务以及执行每项任务的坚持程度上可能会有所不同。虽然个体在任务间的分布以及行为坚持程度上的差异都可能影响集体行为，但我们尚不清楚它们是否以及如何共同影响集体成果。在此，我们使用一个详细的计算模型来研究任务在群体层面的分布以及个体行为坚持程度（具体而言是它们对特定资源地点的忠诚度）对探索新资源与利用熟悉资源之间集体权衡的联合影响。我们开发了一个基于代理的觅食蜜蜂模型，用来自五个蜂群的数据进行参数化，在该模型中我们模拟了在环境中搜索新资源的侦察蜂，以及被侦察蜂招募到新发现资源处的个体，即招募蜂。我们改变了侦察蜂和招募蜂返回特定食物源的坚持程度，发现对于每个坚持程度值，都存在一个不同的侦察蜂与招募蜂的最优比例，该比例能使蜂群的资源采集最大化。此外，侦察蜂坚持程度的变化对蜂群集体觅食产生的影响与招募蜂坚持程度变化产生的影响相反。随着招募蜂坚持程度的增加，使蜂群采集到最多资源的侦察蜂比例会下降。然而，随着侦察蜂坚持程度的增加，这个侦察蜂的最优比例会上升。因此，行为坚持程度和任务参与度可以相互作用，在正交方向上影响蜂群的集体行为。我们的工作为个体和群体层面行为的变化如何共同影响探索新资源与利用熟悉资源之间的权衡提供了新的见解，并产生了新的假设。
