Individual experience-based foraging can generate community territorial structure for competing ant species |
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Authors: | Colby J Tanner |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Biology, University of Utah, 257 South 1400 East Rm 201, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0840, USA |
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Abstract: | To gain additional territory while defending existing territory, animals must acquire and use information regarding resource
characteristics and competitive pressure. For social organisms like ants, individual workers have experiences to acquire information,
but territory establishment is a colony level behavior. Colony behavior, in turn, affects community structure. Here, I investigate
how an individual ant’s previous experience affects its future foraging behavior and how individual behaviors can scale up
to community territorial structure for two coexisting Formica species. To do this, I combine a field survey, a multi-agent computer simulation, and a manipulation experiment. The field
survey shows that workers of both species co-occur on many trees early in the season, but ants on trees become segregated
by species as the season progresses. The simulation demonstrates how this segregated spatial distribution can result from
ants using a foraging strategy in which individuals show a preference for foraging sites based on previous experience. The
experiment suggests that these ants are indeed capable of experience-based foraging behavior; ants preferentially return to
sites where they have had positive experiences and avoid sites where they have had negative experiences. Results from this
study suggest that spatially explicit information can be collected and stored by individuals to facilitate colony territorial
structure, and that future investigations of community territory formation should include effects of individual previous experience. |
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Keywords: | Competition Experience-based foraging Formica Multi-agent simulation Territoriality |
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