TY - JOUR
T1 - Search strategies of ants in landmark-rich habitats
AU - Narendra, Ajay
AU - Cheng, Ken
AU - Sulikowski, Danielle
AU - Wehner, Rudiger
N1 - Imported on 12 Apr 2017 - DigiTool details were: month (773h) = Sept, 2008; Journal title (773t) = Journal of Comparative Physiology A: sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology. ISSNs: 0340-7594;
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - Search is an important tool in an ant's navigation toolbox to relocate food sources and find the inconspicuous nest entrance. In habitats where where landmark information is sparse, homing ants travel their entire home vector before searching systematically with ever increasing loops. Search strategies have not been previously investigated in ants that inhabit landmark-rich habitats where they typically establish stereotypical routes. Here we examine the search strategy of one such ant, Melophorus bagoti, by confining their foraging in one-dimensional channels to determine if their search pattern changes with experience, location of distant cues and altered distance on the home-bound journey. Irrespective of conditions we found that ants exhibit a progressive search that drifted towards the fictive nest and beyond. Segments moving away from the start of the homeward journey were longer than segments heading back towards the start. The right tail distribution of segment lengths was well fitted by a power function, but slopes less than -3 on a log-log plot indicate that the process cannot be characterised as Levy searches that have optimal slopes near -2. A double exponential function fits the distribution of segment lengths better, supporting another theoretically optimal search pattern, the composite Brownian walk.
AB - Search is an important tool in an ant's navigation toolbox to relocate food sources and find the inconspicuous nest entrance. In habitats where where landmark information is sparse, homing ants travel their entire home vector before searching systematically with ever increasing loops. Search strategies have not been previously investigated in ants that inhabit landmark-rich habitats where they typically establish stereotypical routes. Here we examine the search strategy of one such ant, Melophorus bagoti, by confining their foraging in one-dimensional channels to determine if their search pattern changes with experience, location of distant cues and altered distance on the home-bound journey. Irrespective of conditions we found that ants exhibit a progressive search that drifted towards the fictive nest and beyond. Segments moving away from the start of the homeward journey were longer than segments heading back towards the start. The right tail distribution of segment lengths was well fitted by a power function, but slopes less than -3 on a log-log plot indicate that the process cannot be characterised as Levy searches that have optimal slopes near -2. A double exponential function fits the distribution of segment lengths better, supporting another theoretically optimal search pattern, the composite Brownian walk.
KW - Levy walk
KW - Navigation, ants, composite Brownian walk
KW - Search
U2 - 10.1007/s00359-008-0365-8
DO - 10.1007/s00359-008-0365-8
M3 - Article
VL - 194
SP - 929
EP - 938
JO - Journal of Comparative Physiology A: Neuroethology, Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology
JF - Journal of Comparative Physiology A: Neuroethology, Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology
SN - 0340-7594
IS - 11
ER -