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Task partitioning in a ponerine ant.

Guy Theraulaz·Eric Bonabeau·Ricard V Sole·Bertrand Schatz·Jean-Louis Deneubourg
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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.

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AnimalsAntsBehavior, AnimalModels, BiologicalWorkloadJournal ArticleResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

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Guy Theraulaz, Eric Bonabeau, Ricard V Sole, Bertrand Schatz, Jean-Louis Deneubourg. 2002-04-21. Task partitioning in a ponerine ant.. https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2001.2518

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