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The Effect of Trail Pheromone and Path Confinement on Learning of Complex Routes in the Ant Lasius niger
Route learning is key to the survival of many central place foragers, such as bees and many ants. For ants which lay pheromone trails, the presence of a trail may act as an important source of information about whether an error has been made. The presence of trail pheromone has been demonstrated to...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4784821/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26959996 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0149720 |
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author | Czaczkes, Tomer J. Weichselgartner, Tobias Bernadou, Abel Heinze, Jürgen |
author_facet | Czaczkes, Tomer J. Weichselgartner, Tobias Bernadou, Abel Heinze, Jürgen |
author_sort | Czaczkes, Tomer J. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Route learning is key to the survival of many central place foragers, such as bees and many ants. For ants which lay pheromone trails, the presence of a trail may act as an important source of information about whether an error has been made. The presence of trail pheromone has been demonstrated to support route learning, and the effect of pheromones on route choice have been reported to persist even after the pheromones have been removed. This could be explained in two ways: the pheromone may constrain the ants onto the correct route, thus preventing errors and aiding learning. Alternatively, the pheromones may act as a ‘reassurance’, signalling that the learner is on the right path and that learning the path is worthwhile. Here, we disentangle pheromone presence from route confinement in order to test these hypotheses, using the ant Lasius niger as a model. Unexpectedly, we did not find any evidence that pheromones support route learning. Indeed, there was no evidence that ants confined to the correct route learned at all. Thus, while we cannot support the ‘reassurance’ hypothesis, we can rule out the ‘confinement’ hypothesis. Other findings, such as a reduction in pheromone deposition in the presence of trail pheromones, are remarkably consistent with previous experiments. As previously reported, ants which make errors on their outward journey upregulate pheromone deposition on their return. Surprisingly, ants which would go on to make an error down-regulate pheromone deposition on their outward journey, hinting at a capacity for ants to gauge the quality of their own memories. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4784821 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-47848212016-03-23 The Effect of Trail Pheromone and Path Confinement on Learning of Complex Routes in the Ant Lasius niger Czaczkes, Tomer J. Weichselgartner, Tobias Bernadou, Abel Heinze, Jürgen PLoS One Research Article Route learning is key to the survival of many central place foragers, such as bees and many ants. For ants which lay pheromone trails, the presence of a trail may act as an important source of information about whether an error has been made. The presence of trail pheromone has been demonstrated to support route learning, and the effect of pheromones on route choice have been reported to persist even after the pheromones have been removed. This could be explained in two ways: the pheromone may constrain the ants onto the correct route, thus preventing errors and aiding learning. Alternatively, the pheromones may act as a ‘reassurance’, signalling that the learner is on the right path and that learning the path is worthwhile. Here, we disentangle pheromone presence from route confinement in order to test these hypotheses, using the ant Lasius niger as a model. Unexpectedly, we did not find any evidence that pheromones support route learning. Indeed, there was no evidence that ants confined to the correct route learned at all. Thus, while we cannot support the ‘reassurance’ hypothesis, we can rule out the ‘confinement’ hypothesis. Other findings, such as a reduction in pheromone deposition in the presence of trail pheromones, are remarkably consistent with previous experiments. As previously reported, ants which make errors on their outward journey upregulate pheromone deposition on their return. Surprisingly, ants which would go on to make an error down-regulate pheromone deposition on their outward journey, hinting at a capacity for ants to gauge the quality of their own memories. Public Library of Science 2016-03-09 /pmc/articles/PMC4784821/ /pubmed/26959996 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0149720 Text en © 2016 Czaczkes et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Czaczkes, Tomer J. Weichselgartner, Tobias Bernadou, Abel Heinze, Jürgen The Effect of Trail Pheromone and Path Confinement on Learning of Complex Routes in the Ant Lasius niger |
title | The Effect of Trail Pheromone and Path Confinement on Learning of Complex Routes in the Ant Lasius niger |
title_full | The Effect of Trail Pheromone and Path Confinement on Learning of Complex Routes in the Ant Lasius niger |
title_fullStr | The Effect of Trail Pheromone and Path Confinement on Learning of Complex Routes in the Ant Lasius niger |
title_full_unstemmed | The Effect of Trail Pheromone and Path Confinement on Learning of Complex Routes in the Ant Lasius niger |
title_short | The Effect of Trail Pheromone and Path Confinement on Learning of Complex Routes in the Ant Lasius niger |
title_sort | effect of trail pheromone and path confinement on learning of complex routes in the ant lasius niger |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4784821/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26959996 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0149720 |
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