Physics of Living Systems Group, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States.
Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale (CRCA), Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), Université de Toulouse; CNRS; UPS, Toulouse, France.
Elife. 2021 Jul 6;10:e58144. doi: 10.7554/eLife.58144.
Foraging animals have to locate food sources that are usually patchily distributed and subject to competition. Deciding when to leave a food patch is challenging and requires the animal to integrate information about food availability with cues signaling the presence of other individuals (e.g., pheromones). To study how social information transmitted via pheromones can aid foraging decisions, we investigated the behavioral responses of the model animal to food depletion and pheromone accumulation in food patches. We experimentally show that animals consuming a food patch leave it at different times and that the leaving time affects the animal preference for its pheromones. In particular, worms leaving early are attracted to their pheromones, while worms leaving later are repelled by them. We further demonstrate that the inversion from attraction to repulsion depends on associative learning and, by implementing a simple model, we highlight that it is an adaptive solution to optimize food intake during foraging.
觅食动物必须找到通常分布不均且存在竞争的食物源。决定何时离开食物斑块具有挑战性，需要动物将食物可获得性的信息与指示其他个体存在的线索（例如信息素）整合起来。为了研究通过信息素传递的社会信息如何帮助觅食决策，我们研究了模型动物对食物消耗和食物斑块中信息素积累的行为反应。我们的实验表明，消耗食物斑块的动物在不同时间离开食物斑块，离开时间会影响动物对其信息素的偏好。具体来说，较早离开的蠕虫会被它们的信息素吸引，而较晚离开的蠕虫则会被它们的信息素排斥。我们进一步证明，从吸引到排斥的反转取决于联想学习，并且通过实施一个简单的模型，我们强调它是在觅食过程中优化食物摄入的一种适应性解决方案。
