Eloi Igor, Silva-Neto Waldemar Alves, Hattori Wallisen Tadashi, Araújo Arrilton
Laboratório de Biologia Comportamental, Departamento de Fisiologia e Comportamento, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal 59078-970, RN, Brazil.
Departamento de Saúde Coletiva, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Uberlândia 38405-320, MG, Brazil.
Insects. 2024 Nov 30;15(12):948. doi: 10.3390/insects15120948.
When searching for food, animals often make decisions about where to go, how long to stay in a foraging area, and whether to return to the most recently visited spot. These decisions can be enhanced by cognitive traits and adjusted based on previous experience. In social insects, such as ants, foraging efficiency has an impact at both the individual and colony levels. The present study investigated the effect of the distance to, capture success, food size, and the reward rate on decisions of where to forage in , a ponerine ant that forages solitarily and makes individual foraging decisions, in laboratory studies. We also investigated the influence of learning on the workers' performance over successive trips to search for food by measuring the patch residence time in each foraging trip. Four scenarios were created that differed in the food reward rates, the food size offered, and the distances from the colony to the food site. Our work demonstrated that as a general rule, the workers return to the place where a prey item was found on the previous trip, regardless of the distance, food size, and reward rate. When the ants did not capture prey, they were more likely to change their route to search for food. Our results also indicated a learning process for the routes of exploration, as well as the food site conditions for exploration. After repeated trips, the foragers reduced the patch residence time in areas where they did not capture food and quickly changed foraging areas, increasing their foraging efficiency.
在寻找食物时，动物常常要决定去哪里、在觅食区域停留多长时间以及是否返回最近去过的地点。这些决策可通过认知特征得到强化，并根据以往经验进行调整。在蚂蚁等群居昆虫中，觅食效率在个体和群体层面都有影响。本研究在实验室研究中，调查了距离、捕获成功率、食物大小和奖励率对一种单独觅食并做出个体觅食决策的猛蚁属蚂蚁觅食地点决策的影响。我们还通过测量每次觅食行程中的斑块停留时间，研究了学习对工蚁在连续觅食行程中的表现的影响。创建了四种场景，它们在食物奖励率、提供的食物大小以及蚁群到食物地点的距离方面有所不同。我们的研究表明，一般来说，这种猛蚁属工蚁会返回上一次找到猎物的地方，而不管距离、食物大小和奖励率如何。当蚂蚁没有捕获猎物时，它们更有可能改变路线去寻找食物。我们的结果还表明了探索路线以及探索的食物地点条件存在学习过程。经过多次行程后，觅食者减少了在未捕获食物区域的斑块停留时间，并迅速改变觅食区域，从而提高了它们的觅食效率。
