Abstract
Author SummaryMany food resources, such as flowers refilling with nectar or fruits ripening on a tree, replenish over time, so animals that depend on them need to develop strategies to reduce the energy they use during foraging. Here we placed five artificial flowers in a field and set out to examine how bumblebees optimize their foraging routes between distant locations. We tracked the flight paths of individual bees with harmonic radar and recorded all their visits to flowers with motion-sensitive video cameras. This dataset allowed us to study how bees gradually discover flowers, learn their exact position in the landscape, and then find the shortest route to collect nectar from each flower in turn. Using computer simulations, we show that the level of optimisation performance shown by bees can be replicated by a simple learning algorithm that could be implemented in a bee brain. We postulate that this mechanism allows bumblebees to optimise their foraging routes in more complex natural conditions, where the number and productivity of flowers vary.
Highlights
Animals moving in familiar environments often follow habitual routes to navigate between important locations, such as the nest and feeding sites
Very little is known about the routing decisions made by animals that must visit multiple sites before returning home. These routing challenges are common in central place foraging nectarivores and frugivores, which typically exploit familiar food resources that replenish over time
Taking advantage of the possibility to train bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) to forage on artificial flowers in the field [22], to track their complete flight paths with harmonic radar [23,24], and to record all their flower visits with motion-sensitive cameras, we investigate the acquisition of long-distance traplines by animals with known foraging experience
Summary
Animals moving in familiar environments often follow habitual routes to navigate between important locations, such as the nest and feeding sites. Very little is known about the routing decisions made by animals that must visit multiple sites before returning home. These routing challenges are common in central place foraging nectarivores and frugivores, which typically exploit familiar food resources that replenish over time. Many of these animals develop stable foraging circuits (traplines) between distant food patches [6,7,8,9,10] and must sometimes cover several kilometres to fill their crop [11]. Many animals [13,14,15,16], including humans [17,18], navigating between multiple locations are thought to find efficient routes using heuristic strategies, such as linking nearest unvisited sites or planning a few steps ahead
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