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Automated tracking and analysis of ant trajectories shows variation in forager exploration.

ABSTRACT: Determining how ant colonies optimize foraging while mitigating pathogen and predator risks provides insight into how the ants have achieved ecological success. Ants must respond to changing resource conditions, but exploration comes at a cost of higher potential exposure to threats. Fungal infected cadavers surround the main foraging trails of the carpenter ant Camponotus rufipes, offering a system to study how foragers behave given the persistent occurrence of disease threats. Studies on social insect foraging behavior typically require many hours of human labor due to the high density of individuals. To overcome this, we developed deep learning based computer vision algorithms to track foraging ants, frame-by-frame, from video footage shot under the natural conditions of a tropical forest floor at night. We found that most foragers walk in straight lines overlapping the same areas as other ants, but there is a subset of foragers with greater exploration. Consistency in walking behavior may protect most ants from infection, while foragers that explore unique portions of the trail may be more likely to encounter fungal spores implying a trade-off between resource discovery and risk avoidance.

SUBMITTER: Imirzian N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6744467 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Automated tracking and analysis of ant trajectories shows variation in forager exploration.

Imirzian Natalie N Zhang Yizhe Y Kurze Christoph C Loreto Raquel G RG Chen Danny Z DZ Hughes David P DP

Scientific reports 20190913 1

Determining how ant colonies optimize foraging while mitigating pathogen and predator risks provides insight into how the ants have achieved ecological success. Ants must respond to changing resource conditions, but exploration comes at a cost of higher potential exposure to threats. Fungal infected cadavers surround the main foraging trails of the carpenter ant Camponotus rufipes, offering a system to study how foragers behave given the persistent occurrence of disease threats. Studies on socia ...[more]

PMID: 31519955

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Project description:Understanding the factors shaping human crania has long been a goal of biological anthropology, and climate, diet, and population history are three of the most well-established influences. The effects of these factors are, however, rarely compared within a single, variable population, limiting interpretations of their relative contribution to craniofacial form. Jomon prehistoric foragers inhabited Japan throughout its climatic and ecological range and developed correspondingly varied modes of subsistence. We have previously demonstrated that a large sample of Jomon crania showed no clear climatic pattern; here, we examine variation in Jomon crania in more detail to determine if dietary factors and/or population history influence human intrapopulation variation at this scale. Based on well-established archaeological differences, we divide the Jomon into dietary groups and use geometric morphometric methods to analyse relationships between cranial shape, diet, and population history. We find evidence for diet-related influences on the shape of the neurocranium, particularly in the temporalis region. These shape differences may be interpreted in the context of regional variation in the biomechanical requirements of different diets. More experimental biomechanical and nutritional evidence is needed, however, to move suggested links between dietary content and cranial shape from plausible to well-supported. In contrast with the global scale of human variation, where neutral processes are the strongest influence on cranial shape, we find no pattern of population history amongst individuals from these Jomon sites. The determinants of cranial morphology are complex and the effect of diet is likely mediated by factors including sex, social factors, and chronology. Our results underline the subtlety of the effects of dietary variation beyond the forager/farmer dichotomy on cranial morphology and contribute to our understanding of the complexity of selective pressures shaping human phenotypes on different geographic scales.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12520-023-01901-6.

Dataset Information

Automated tracking and analysis of ant trajectories shows variation in forager exploration.

Publications

Automated tracking and analysis of ant trajectories shows variation in forager exploration.

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