Department of Ecology, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland.
Elife. 2020 Dec 9;9:e61298. doi: 10.7554/eLife.61298.
Ants use debris as tools to collect and transport liquid food to the nest. Previous studies showed that this behaviour is flexible whereby ants learn to use artificial material that is novel to them and select tools with optimal soaking properties. However, the process of tool use has not been studied at the individual level. We investigated whether workers specialise in tool use and whether there is a link between individual personality traits and tool use in the ant . Only a small number of workers performed tool use and they did it repeatedly, although they also collected solid food. Personality predicted the probability to perform tool use: ants that showed higher exploratory activity and were more attracted to a prey in the personality tests became the new tool users when previous tool users were removed from the group. This suggests that, instead of extreme task specialisation, variation in personality traits within the colony may improve division of labour.
蚂蚁会使用碎片作为工具，将液体食物搬回蚁巢。先前的研究表明，这种行为具有灵活性，蚂蚁会学习使用对它们来说新颖的人工材料，并选择具有最佳吸水性的工具。然而，对于个体层面上的工具使用过程，我们还知之甚少。我们研究了蚂蚁是否会专门使用工具，以及个体的性格特征是否与工具使用有关。只有少数工人会使用工具，尽管它们也会收集固体食物，但它们会反复使用工具。个性预测了使用工具的可能性：在个性测试中表现出更高探索性活动和对猎物更感兴趣的蚂蚁，当先前的工具使用者从群体中移除时，它们更有可能成为新的工具使用者。这表明，与其说是极端的任务专业化，不如说是蚁群内部个性特征的变化，可能会提高劳动分工。
Zotero 插件