Task partitioning in a ponerine ant.
This paper reports a study of the task partitioning observed in the ponerine ant Ectatomma ruidum, where prey-foraging behaviour can be subdivided into two categories: stinging and transporting. Stingers kill live prey and transporters carry prey corpses back to the nest. Stinging and transporting behaviours are released by certain stimuli through response thresholds; the respective stimuli for stinging and transporting appear to be the number of live prey and the number of prey corpses. A response threshold model, the parameters of which are all measured empirically, reproduces a set of non-trivial colony-level dynamical patterns observed in the experiments. This combination of modelling and empirical work connects explicitly the level of individual behaviour with colony-level patterns of work organization.
Theraulaz
Guy
G
Laboratoire d'Ethologie et Cognition Animale, CNRS - ERS 2382, Université Paul Sabatier, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse Cédex, France. theraula@cict.fr
Bonabeau
Eric
E
Sole
Ricard V
RV
Schatz
Bertrand
B
Deneubourg
Jean-Louis
JL
D000818:Animals; D001000:Ants; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D008954:Models, Biological; D016526:Workload