Task partitioning in a ponerine ant

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.