Limited flexibility and unusual longevity shape forager allocation in the Florida harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex badius)

Kwapich, Christina L.; Tschinkel, Wälter R.

doi:10.1007/s00265-015-2039-1

Cited by 29 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Colonies could therefore benefit substantially from flexible patterns of behavioral responsiveness to compensate for lost foragers, although some ant taxa are unlikely to respond flexibly to demographic changes (Kwapich and Tschinkel 2016). Our findings could suggest that the P. dentata workforce is composed of behaviorally flexible workers, although repeated measurements of marked individuals would be needed to test this hypothesis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Typically, workers progress from inside- to outside- nest tasks with increasing age (Hölldobler and Wilson 1990). Intranidal and extranidal tasks may be performed by distinct worker groups (Kwapich and Tschinkel 2013, 2016; Mersch et al 2013) or by behaviorally totipotent workers (Traniello 1978; Seid and Traniello 2006). Spatial fidelity likely influences task selection, which could be driven by differences in worker age, genetics, or other factors (Pamminger et al 2014) that may covary with age.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Age, worksite location, neuromodulators, and task performance in the ant Pheidole dentata

Giraldo

Rusakov

Diloreto

et al. 2016

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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Social insect workers modify task performance according to age-related schedules of behavioral development, and/or changing colony labor requirements based on flexible responses that may be independent of age. Using known-age minor workers of the ant Pheidole dentata throughout 68% of their 140-day laboratory lifespan, we asked whether workers found inside or outside the nest differed in task performance and if behaviors were correlated with and/or causally linked to changes in brain serotonin (5HT) and dopamine (DA). Our results suggest that task performance patterns of individually assayed minors collected at these two spatially different worksites were independent of age. Outside-nest minors displayed significantly higher levels of predatory behavior and greater activity than inside-nest minors, but these groups did not differ in brood care or phototaxis. We examined the relationship of 5HT and DA to these behaviors in known-age minors by quantifying individual brain titers. Both monoamines did not increase significantly from 20 to 95 days of age. DA did not appear to directly regulate worksite location, although titers were significantly higher in outside-nest than inside-nest workers. Pharmacological depletion of 5HT did not affect nursing, predation, phototaxis or activity. Our results suggest that worker task capabilities are independent of age beyond 20 days, and only predatory behavior can be consistently predicted by spatial location. This could reflect worker flexibility or variability in the behavior of individuals collected at each location, which could be influenced by complex interactions between age, worksite location, social interactions, neuromodulators, and other environmental and internal regulators of behavior.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age, worksite location, neuromodulators, and task performance in the ant Pheidole dentata

Giraldo

Rusakov

Diloreto

et al. 2016

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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“…In the seed-harvester ant Pogonomyrmex badius, the removal of 50% of foragers is not compensated for by a transition from inside workers to foraging (Kwapich and Tschinkel, 2013). Similarly, the addition of larvae to enhance the workload for brood-tending individuals induces no behavioural reversion from foraging to nursing at the expense of brood survival (Kwapich and Tschinkel, 2016). This suggests that P. badius has a unidirectional progression with no possible behavioural reversion.…”

Section: Different Degrees Of Behavioural Flexibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Within-individual behavioural variability and division of labour in social insects

Jeanson

2019

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Division of labour, whereby individuals divide the workload in a group, is a recurrent property of social living. The current conceptual framework for division of labour in social insects is provided by the responsethreshold model. This model posits that the differences between individuals (i.e. between-individual variability) in responsiveness to task-associated stimuli is a key feature for task specialisation. The consistency of individual behaviours (i.e. within-individual variability) in task performance represents an additional but little-considered component driving robust patterns of division of labour. On the one hand, the presence of workers with a high level of within-individual variability presumably allows colonies to rapidly adapt to external fluctuations. On the other hand, a reduced degree of within-individual variability promotes a stricter specialisation in task performance, thereby limiting the costs of task switching. The ideal balance between flexibility and canalisation probably varies depending on the developmental stage of the colony to satisfy its changing needs. Here, I introduce the main sources of within-individual variability in behaviours in social insects and I review neural correlates accompanying the changes in behavioural flexibility. I propose the hypothesis that the positive scaling between group size and the intensity of task specialisation, a relationship consistently reported both within and between taxa, may rely on reduced within-individual variability via selforganised processes linked to the quality of brood care. Overall, I emphasise the need for a more comprehensive characterisation of the response dynamics of individuals to better understand the mechanisms shaping division of labour in social insects.

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“…Primary, carrier, passive, and fussy ants provide different contributions to the collective decisionmaking process undergoing a colony emigration that can be regarded as dividing the labor of gathering, spreading, and processing the information necessary to achieve a collective decision. While the behavior of workers (and therefore their membership in a particular behavioral caste) is stable over the course of the 5 colony emigrations we performed, we know that individual workers change the tasks they perform over time as a function of their developmental age (Tschinkel 1987;Seid and Traniello 2006;Tschinkel 2011;Kwapich andTschinkel 2013, 2016;Charbonneau et al 2017). Although the proportion of workers engaging in tandem running (i.e., primary ants) seems relatively stable (Richardson et al 2018;Pratt et al 2005Pratt et al , 2002, it remains to be shown that this is still true for each behavioral caste we identified.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Division of labour promotes the spread of information in colony emigrations by the antTemnothorax rugatulus

Valentini

Masuda

Shaffer

et al. 2019

Preprint

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The fitness of group-living animals often depends on the efficiency with which members share information about resources, so that the group can collectively decide how best to allocate its efforts.Theoretical studies have shown that collective choices can emerge from homogeneous individuals following identical rules, but real animals show much evidence for heterogeneity in the degree and nature of their contribution to group decisions. In the social insects, for example, the transmission and processing of information is influenced by an often-neglected but well-organized division of labor of behaviorally heterogeneous workers. Studies that accurately quantify how this behavioral heterogeneity affects the spread of information among group members are still lacking. In this paper, we look at nest choices during colony emigrations of the ant Temnothorax rugatulus and measure the degree of behavioral heterogeneity of workers. Using both machine learning and network science methods, we identify and characterize behavioral categories of workers, and we analyze workers' contributions to the spread of information during each emigration.foraging patches (Detrain and Deneubourg 2008;Pablo et al. 2010), or suddenly changing the direction of group motion (Couzin et al. 2005; Conradt and Roper 2010) are just a few among many examples of collective decisions. Despite the diversity in behavioral mechanisms that have evolved to address these and similar problems, the underlying strategies for gathering, sharing, and processing the information necessary to address the problem at hand share many commonalities across species. Collectives pool information to mitigate the effect of uncertainty and increase decision accuracy (Conradt 2012), which requires efficient spread of information from informed individuals to uninformed ones (Ward et al. 2008;Franks et al. 2002;Couzin et al. 2005).

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Limited flexibility and unusual longevity shape forager allocation in the Florida harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex badius)

Cited by 29 publications

References 51 publications

Age, worksite location, neuromodulators, and task performance in the ant Pheidole dentata

Age, worksite location, neuromodulators, and task performance in the ant Pheidole dentata

Within-individual behavioural variability and division of labour in social insects

Division of labour promotes the spread of information in colony emigrations by the antTemnothorax rugatulus

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