Lobecke Anne, Kern Roland, Egelhaaf Martin
Department of Neurobiology and Cluster of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' (CITEC), Bielefeld University, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany
Department of Neurobiology and Cluster of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' (CITEC), Bielefeld University, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany.
J Exp Biol. 2018 Jan 25;221(Pt 2):jeb168674. doi: 10.1242/jeb.168674.
It is essential for central place foragers, such as bumblebees, to return reliably to their nest. Bumblebees, leaving their inconspicuous nest hole for the first time need to gather and learn sufficient information about their surroundings to allow them to return to their nest at the end of their trip, instead of just flying away to forage. Therefore, we assume an intrinsic learning programme that manifests itself in the flight structure immediately after leaving the nest for the first time. In this study, we recorded and analysed the first outbound flight of individually marked naïve bumblebees in an indoor environment. We found characteristic loop-like features in the flight pattern that appear to be necessary for the bees to acquire environmental information and might be relevant for finding the nest hole after a foraging trip. Despite common features in their spatio-temporal organisation, first departure flights from the nest are characterised by a high level of variability in their loop-like flight structure across animals. Changes in turn direction of body orientation, for example, are distributed evenly across the entire area used for the flights without any systematic relationship to the nest location. By considering the common flight motifs and this variability, we came to the hypothesis that a kind of dynamic snapshot is taken during the early phase of departure flights centred at the nest location. The quality of this snapshot is hypothesised to be 'tested' during the later phases of the departure flights concerning its usefulness for local homing.
对于诸如大黄蜂这样的中心地觅食者来说，可靠地返回巢穴至关重要。首次离开不显眼的巢穴洞口的大黄蜂需要收集并了解周围环境的足够信息，以便在行程结束时能够返回巢穴，而不是直接飞走觅食。因此，我们假设存在一种内在的学习程序，它在首次离巢后立即在飞行结构中表现出来。在这项研究中，我们记录并分析了在室内环境中单独标记的未成熟大黄蜂的首次外出飞行。我们在飞行模式中发现了特征性的环状特征，这些特征似乎是蜜蜂获取环境信息所必需的，并且可能与觅食之旅后找到巢穴洞口有关。尽管它们的时空组织有共同特征，但从巢穴出发的首次飞行的特点是，不同个体的环状飞行结构存在高度变异性。例如，身体方向的转向变化均匀分布在整个飞行区域，与巢穴位置没有任何系统关系。通过考虑共同的飞行模式和这种变异性，我们得出一个假设，即在以巢穴位置为中心的出发飞行早期阶段会拍摄一种动态快照。据推测，这一快照的质量在出发飞行的后期阶段会就其对局部归巢的有用性进行“检验”。
