Search strategies of ants in landmark-rich habitats |
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Authors: | Ajay Narendra Ken Cheng Danielle Sulikowski Rüdiger Wehner |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia;(2) Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia;(3) Department of Zoology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;(4) ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision Science, Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia |
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Abstract: | Search is an important tool in an ant’s navigational toolbox to relocate food sources and find the inconspicuous nest entrance.
In habitats where landmark information is sparse, homing ants travel their entire home vector before searching systematically
with ever increasing loops. Search strategies have not been previously investigated in ants that inhabit landmark-rich habitats
where they typically establish stereotypical routes. Here we examine the search strategy in one such ant, Melophorus bagoti, by confining their foraging in one-dimensional channels to determine if their search pattern changes with experience, location
of distant cues and altered distance on the homebound journey. Irrespective of conditions, we found ants exhibit a progressive
search that drifted towards the fictive nest and beyond. Segments moving away from the start of the homeward journey were
longer than segments heading back towards the start. The right tail distribution of segment lengths was well fitted by a power
function, but slopes less than −3 on a log-log plot indicate that the process cannot be characterized as Lévy searches that
have optimal slopes near –2. A double exponential function fits the distribution of segment lengths better, supporting another
theoretically optimal search pattern, the composite Brownian walk. |
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Keywords: | Search Navigation Ants Composite Brownian walk Lévy walk |
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