Search strategies of ants in landmark-rich habitats

Search is an important tool in an ant's navigational toolbox to relocate food sources and find the inconspicuous nest entrance. In habitats where landmark information is sparse, homing ants travel their entire home vector before searching systematically with ever increasing loops. Search strate...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Comparative Physiology Vol. 194; no. 11; pp. 929 - 938
Main Authors: Narendra, Ajay, Cheng, Ken, Sulikowski, Danielle, Wehner, Rüdiger
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Berlin/Heidelberg : Springer-Verlag 01.11.2008
Springer-Verlag
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Animal Physiology
Animals
Ants - physiology
Appetitive Behavior - physiology
Behavior, Animal
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Desert Climate
Ecosystem
Exploratory Behavior - physiology
Feeding Behavior - physiology
Food sources
foraging
Formicidae
Habitat
habitats
Homing behavior
Life Sciences
Melophorus bagoti
Navigation behavior
Nests
Neurosciences
Original Paper
physiology
Space Perception - physiology
tail
Tails
Zoology
Navigation
Ants
Composite Brownian walk
Lévy walk
Search
ISSN:0340-7594, 1432-1351
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Search is an important tool in an ant's navigational toolbox to relocate food sources and find the inconspicuous nest entrance. In habitats 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 in 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 homebound journey. Irrespective of conditions, we found 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 characterized as Lévy 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.
Bibliography:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00359-008-0365-8
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ISSN:0340-7594
1432-1351
DOI:10.1007/s00359-008-0365-8