School of Zoology, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Department of Geophysics, Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Insect Sci. 2023 Feb;30(1):241-250. doi: 10.1111/1744-7917.13090. Epub 2022 Jun 29.
Animals often search for food more efficiently with experience. However, the contribution of experience to foraging success under direct competition has rarely been examined. Here we used colonies of an individually foraging desert ant to investigate the value of spatial experience. First, we trained worker groups of equal numbers to solve either a complex or a simple maze. We then tested pairs of both groups against one another in reaching a food reward. This task required solving the same complex maze that one of the groups had been trained in, to determine which group would exploit better the food reward. The worker groups previously trained in the complex mazes reached the food reward faster and more of these workers fed on the food than those trained in simple mazes, but only in the intermediate size group. To determine the relative importance of group size versus spatial experience in exploiting food patches, we then tested smaller trained worker groups against larger untrained ones. The larger groups outcompeted the smaller ones, despite the latter's advantage of spatial experience. The contribution of spatial experience, as found here, appears to be small, and depends on group size: an advantage of a few workers of the untrained group over the trained group negates its benefits.
动物通常通过经验更有效地寻找食物。然而，经验对直接竞争下觅食成功的贡献很少被检验。在这里，我们使用单个觅食的沙漠蚂蚁的殖民地来研究空间经验的价值。首先，我们训练数量相等的工蚁群体来解决复杂或简单的迷宫。然后，我们在到达食物奖励的过程中测试两组之间的配对。这个任务要求解决其中一个群体接受过训练的复杂迷宫，以确定哪个群体能更好地利用食物奖励。以前在复杂迷宫中受过训练的工蚁群体更快地到达了食物奖励，并且比那些在简单迷宫中受过训练的工蚁群体更多地食用了食物，但这只发生在中等大小的群体中。为了确定在利用食物斑块方面，群体大小与空间经验的相对重要性，我们随后测试了较小的受过训练的工蚁群体与较大的未受过训练的群体之间的对抗。尽管后者具有空间经验的优势，但较大的群体还是战胜了较小的群体。如这里所发现的，空间经验的贡献似乎很小，并且取决于群体大小：未受过训练的群体中少数工蚁的优势可以抵消其益处。
