Lehue Marine, Detrain Claire
Unit of Social Ecology, Université libre de Bruxelles, CP231, Bd du Triomphe, 1050, Brussels, Belgium.
Unit of Social Ecology, Université libre de Bruxelles, CP231, Bd du Triomphe, 1050, Brussels, Belgium.
Behav Processes. 2019 Mar;160:42-50. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2018.12.006. Epub 2018 Dec 8.
Nest entrances are key locations where information about environmental opportunities and constraints are shared between foragers and inner-nest workers. However, despite its functional value, we still lack a detailed characterisation of the interface between the nest and the environment. Here, we identified the social interface in the ant Myrmica rubra as being the population of ants that faced the nest entrance and that received significantly more contacts from returning foragers than other nearby ants. We also spatially delineated the entrance area that hosted the social interface, a 2-centimetre radius area from the nest openings, which influences the position, orientation, and behaviour of ants. Then, we studied the impact of additional entrances on this social interface as well as on the flow of foragers. The size of the social interface increased according to the number of open entrances through the progressive reorientation of the ants toward new openings. We also observed a significant, although less than proportional, increase in the flows of ants that were progressively distributed homogeneously between all open entrances. Thus, our work highlights the flexibility of both the social interface and the flow of foragers to changes in the numbers of passageways between the nest and the environment.
蚁巢入口是觅食者与巢内工蚁之间共享有关环境机遇和限制信息的关键位置。然而，尽管其具有功能价值，但我们仍缺乏对蚁巢与环境之间界面的详细描述。在这里，我们确定在红蚁（Myrmica rubra）中，社会界面是面对蚁巢入口且比附近其他蚂蚁从返回的觅食者那里获得更多接触的蚂蚁群体。我们还在空间上划定了承载社会界面的入口区域，即从巢口起半径为2厘米的区域，该区域会影响蚂蚁的位置、方向和行为。然后，我们研究了额外入口对这个社会界面以及觅食者流动的影响。随着蚂蚁逐渐重新定向朝向新的开口，社会界面的大小根据开放入口的数量而增加。我们还观察到，在所有开放入口之间逐渐均匀分布的蚂蚁流量有显著增加，尽管增加的比例小于入口数量增加的比例。因此，我们的工作突出了社会界面和觅食者流动对巢与环境之间通道数量变化的灵活性。
