Task Partitioning in a Ponerine Ant

✍ Scribed by GUY THERAULAZ; ERIC BONABEAU; RICARD V. SOLÉ; BERTRAND SCHATZ; JEAN-LOUIS DENEUBOURG

• Book ID: 102613694
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 234 KB
• Volume: 215
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5193
• DOI: 10.1006/jtbi.2001.2518

✦ Synopsis

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.