Animals often search for food more efficiently with experience.However,the contribution of experience toforaging success under direct competition has rarelybeen examined.Here we used colonies of an individually foragi...Animals often search for food more efficiently with experience.However,the contribution of experience toforaging success under direct competition has rarelybeen examined.Here we used colonies of an individually foraging desert ant to investigate the value of spatial experience.First,we trained worker groups of equal numbers to solve either a complex or a simple maze.We then tested pairs of both groups against one another in reaching a food reward.This task required solving the same complex maze that one of the groups had been trained in,to determine which group would exploit better the food reward.The worker groups previously trained in the complex mazes reached the food reward faster and more of these workers fed on the food than those trained in simple mazes,but only in the intermediate size group.To determine the relative importance of group size versus spatial experience in exploiting food patches,we then tested smaller trained worker groups against larger untrained ones.The larger groups outcompeted the smaller ones,despite the latter's advantage of spatial experience.The contribution of spatial experience,as found here,appears to be small,and depends on group size:an advantage of a few workers of the untrained group over the trained group negates its benefits.展开更多
Theories of forgetting highlight 2 active mechanisms through which animals forget prior knowledge by recipro-cal disruption of memories.According to“proactive interference,”information learned previously interferes ...Theories of forgetting highlight 2 active mechanisms through which animals forget prior knowledge by recipro-cal disruption of memories.According to“proactive interference,”information learned previously interferes with the acquisition of new information,whereas“retroactive interference”suggests that newly gathered information interferes with already existing information.Our goal was to examine the possible effect of both mechanisms in the desert ant Cataglyphis niger,which does not use pheromone recruitment,when learning spatial information while searching for food in a maze.Our experiment indicated that neither proactive nor retroactive interference took place in this system although this awaits confirmation with individual-level learning assays.Rather,the ants’persistence or readiness to search for food grew with successive runs in the maze.Elevated persistence led to more ant workers arriving at the food when retested a day later,even if the maze was shifted between runs.We support thisfinding in a second experiment,where ant workers reached the food reward at the maze end in higher numbers after encountering food in the maze entry compared to a treatment,in which food was present only at the maze end.This result suggests that spatial learning and search persistence are 2 parallel behavioral mechanisms,both assisting foraging ants.We suggest that their relative contribution should depend on habitat complexity.展开更多
基金funding this research project(DFGgrant no.FO 298/31-1).
文摘Animals often search for food more efficiently with experience.However,the contribution of experience toforaging success under direct competition has rarelybeen examined.Here we used colonies of an individually foraging desert ant to investigate the value of spatial experience.First,we trained worker groups of equal numbers to solve either a complex or a simple maze.We then tested pairs of both groups against one another in reaching a food reward.This task required solving the same complex maze that one of the groups had been trained in,to determine which group would exploit better the food reward.The worker groups previously trained in the complex mazes reached the food reward faster and more of these workers fed on the food than those trained in simple mazes,but only in the intermediate size group.To determine the relative importance of group size versus spatial experience in exploiting food patches,we then tested smaller trained worker groups against larger untrained ones.The larger groups outcompeted the smaller ones,despite the latter's advantage of spatial experience.The contribution of spatial experience,as found here,appears to be small,and depends on group size:an advantage of a few workers of the untrained group over the trained group negates its benefits.
基金We thank the German Research Foundation for funding this research project(DFGgrant no.FO 298/31-1).
文摘Theories of forgetting highlight 2 active mechanisms through which animals forget prior knowledge by recipro-cal disruption of memories.According to“proactive interference,”information learned previously interferes with the acquisition of new information,whereas“retroactive interference”suggests that newly gathered information interferes with already existing information.Our goal was to examine the possible effect of both mechanisms in the desert ant Cataglyphis niger,which does not use pheromone recruitment,when learning spatial information while searching for food in a maze.Our experiment indicated that neither proactive nor retroactive interference took place in this system although this awaits confirmation with individual-level learning assays.Rather,the ants’persistence or readiness to search for food grew with successive runs in the maze.Elevated persistence led to more ant workers arriving at the food when retested a day later,even if the maze was shifted between runs.We support thisfinding in a second experiment,where ant workers reached the food reward at the maze end in higher numbers after encountering food in the maze entry compared to a treatment,in which food was present only at the maze end.This result suggests that spatial learning and search persistence are 2 parallel behavioral mechanisms,both assisting foraging ants.We suggest that their relative contribution should depend on habitat complexity.
