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Markus Knaden

Publications and source records attributed to Markus Knaden.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Fundamental difference in life history traits of two species of Cataglyphis ants.

BACKGROUND: The two sympatric species of Tunisian desert ants, Cataglyphis bicolor and C. mauritanica, do not exhibit any differences in their foraging ecology, e.g. in food preferences and in their spatial and temporal activity patterns. Here we show that instead the two species markedly differ in their life histories. RESULTS: We analysed mtDNA of specimens that were collected along a 250-km transect. C. bicolor exhibited a genetically unstructured population (with the genetic and geographic distances among colonies not being correlated). On the contrary the populations of the polygynous C. mauritanica were clearly structured, i.e. exhibited a strong correlation between genetic and geographic distances. This difference is in accordance with large queen dispersal distances due to far-reaching mating flights in C. bicolor and small queen dispersal distances due to colony foundation by budding in C. mauritanica. Furthermore, wherever we found populations of both species to coexist within the same habitat, the habitat was used agriculturally. Mapping nest positions over periods of several years showed that plowing dramatically decreased the nest densities of either species. CONCLUSION: We conclude that owing to its greater queen dispersal potential C. bicolor might be more successful in quickly re-colonizing disturbed areas, while the slowly dispersing C. mauritanica could later out-compete C. bicolor by adopting its effective nest-budding strategy. According to this scenario the observed sympatry of the two species might be an intermediate stage in which faster colonization by one species and more powerful exploitation of space by the other species have somehow balanced each other out. In conclusion, C. bicolor and C. mauritanica represent an example where environmental disturbances in combination with different life histories might beget sympatry in congeneric species with overlapping niches.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2006

Desert ants: is active locomotion a prerequisite for path integration?

Desert ants Cataglyphis fortis have been shown to be able to employ two mechanisms of distance estimation: exploiting both optic flow and proprioceptive information. This study aims at understanding possible interactions between the two possibly redundant mechanisms of distance estimation. We ask whether in Cataglyphis the obviously minor contribution of optic flow would increase or even take over completely if the ants were deprived of reliable proprioceptive information. In various experimental paradigms ants were subjected to passive horizontal displacements during which they perceived optic flow, but were prohibited from active locomotion. The results show that in desert ants active locomotion is essential for providing the ants' odometer and hence its path integrator with the necessary information.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

Ant navigation: resetting the path integrator.

Desert ants use path integration as their predominant system of long-distance navigation, but they also make use of route-defining and nest-defining visual landmarks. Such landmark-gained information might override the information provided by the path integrator, but nevertheless the path integrator keeps running. Here we show that only cues that are associated with the ant being inside the nest are able to reset the path integrator to zero state. Ants were captured at a feeder, i.e. without having run off their home vector, and were forced to enter the nest. On their next outbound run their walking direction differed by 180 degrees from that of ants that had also been captured at the feeder but instead of having been forced to enter the interior of the nest were released at its entrance. Whereas these latter ants still ran off their home vector pointing in the feeder-nest direction (and by this departed from the nest in a direction opposite to the feeder direction) the former ants had reset their home vector to zero state, and had therefore been able to reload their learned feeder vector, and consequently departed from the nest in the feeder direction. Owing to its egocentric nature the path-integrator is error prone. Hence, it is a suitable strategy to reset the path integrator if the ant has appeared at its final goal, the nest. Otherwise during consecutive foraging runs navigational errors would steadily increase.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

Uncertainty about nest position influences systematic search strategies in desert ants.

Foraging desert ants return to their starting point, the nest, by means of path integration. If the path-integration vector has been run off but the nest has not yet been reached, the ants engage in systematic search behavior. This behavior results in a system of search loops of ever increasing size and finally leads to a search density profile peaking at the location where the path integration system has been reset to zero. In this study we investigate whether this systematic search behavior is adapted to the uncertainty resulting from the preceding foraging run. We show first that the longer the distances of the foraging excursions, the larger the errors occurring during path integration, and second that the ants adapt their systematic search strategy to their increasing uncertainty by extending their search pattern. Hence, the density of the systematic search pattern is correlated with the ants' confidence in their path integrator. This confidence decreases with increasing foraging distances.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

Phylogeny of three parapatric species of desert ants, Cataglyphis bicolor, C. viatica, and C. savignyi: a comparison of mitochondrial DNA, nuclear DNA, and morphological data.

Due to morphological comparisons the Tunisian desert ant species Cataglyphis bicolor has been divided into three parapatric species: C. bicolor, C. viatica, and C. savignyi. The species status of the latter is supported by sequence analyses of the mitochondrial CO1 and CO2 region, while analyses of the same mitochondrial region lacked resolution for the separation of C. bicolor and C. viatica. However, the geographic distribution of mtDNA haplotypes points to different population viscosities with C. bicolor queens having longer migration distances than queens of C. viatica. Furthermore, by the use of microsatellites we excluded ongoing gene flow between geographically overlapping populations of C. bicolor and C. viatica, and hence support the morphology-based three-species hypothesis. Concerning the ongoing discussion on the future roles of morphology and molecular biology in systematics we call for a combination of both whenever possible.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

Path integration in desert ants controls aggressiveness.

Cataglyphis ants of the Sahara Desert are extremely aggressive toward members of other colonies if they are close to their nest entrance, but not once they have embarked on their wide foraging journeys. We show that the ants reach the same level of aggressiveness when they are far from their actual nesting site but their path integrator--their main navigational toolkit--tells them that they are close, indicating a role for the animal's path integrator beyond navigation.

Aggression↗