title: Task partitioning in a ponerine ant.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire d'Ethologie et Cognition Animale, CNRS - ERS 2382, Université Paul Sabatier, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse Cédex, France. theraula@cict.fr
authors.forename: Guy
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Theraulaz
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bonabeau
authors.forename: Ricard V
authors.initials: RV
authors.lastname: Sole
authors.forename: Bertrand
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Schatz
authors.forename: Jean-Louis
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Deneubourg
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001000:Ants; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D008954:Models, Biological; D016526:Workload