Follower ants in a tandem pair are not always naïve.

Patrick Schultheiss,Chloé A Raderschall,Ajay Narendra

doi:10.1038/srep10747

Patrick Schultheiss, Chloé A Raderschall + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/srep10747

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Abstract

In addition to foraging individually several species of ants guide nestmates to a goal by tandem running. We found that the Australian ant, Camponotus consobrinus, forages both individually and by tandem running to head to the same goal, nest-specific native Australian trees on which they forage. While paths of solitary foragers and initial paths of tandem followers showed no differences in heading directions or straightness, tandem followers moved at about half the speed of solitary runs. When leaders were experimentally removed, follower ants initially engaged in a systematic search around the point of interruption, following which they either (a) headed directly towards and successfully reached the foraging trees, or (b) continued searching or (c) returned to the nest. The high incidence of followers that successfully navigated towards the foraging trees on their own provides strong evidence that many tandem followers are in fact experienced foragers. Detailed analysis of the searching behaviour revealed that even seemingly lost followers displayed a directional bias towards the foraging trees in their search path. Our results show that in a foraging context follower ants in a tandem pair are not always naïve.

Highlights

In addition to foraging individually several species of ants guide nestmates to a goal by tandem running
We found that the Australian ant, Camponotus consobrinus, forages both individually and by tandem running to head to the same goal, nest-specific native Australian trees on which they forage
Both solitary foragers and tandem pairs headed towards three trees located nearly 20 m from the nest, on which they foraged at night

Summary

Introduction

In addition to foraging individually several species of ants guide nestmates to a goal by tandem running. We found that the Australian ant, Camponotus consobrinus, forages both individually and by tandem running to head to the same goal, nest-specific native Australian trees on which they forage. The Australian Banded Sugar ant, Camponotus consobrinus (Erichson) (Fig. 1), travels either individually or in tandem pairs to nest-specific native trees (Casuarina or Eucalyptus) on which they forage[23]. This provides us with an opportunity to identify in the ant’s natural habitat the navigational knowledge of followers in a tandem pair in a foraging context. If the followers are truly naïve, we expect them to search extensively at the location where they lost contact with the leader and if the followers are experienced we expect them to head directly towards their nest-specific foraging trees

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