Wendt, Stephanie and Czaczkes, Tomer J. (2017) Individual ant workers show self-control. BIOLOGY LETTERS, 13 (10): 20170450. ISSN 1744-9561, 1744-957X
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)Abstract
Often, the first option is not the best. Self-control can allow humans and animals to improve resource intake under such conditions. Self-control in animals is often investigated using intertemporal choice tasks-choosing a smaller reward immediately or a larger reward after a delay. However, intertemporal choice tasks may underestimate self-control, as test subjects may not fully understand the task. Vertebrates show much greater apparent self-control in more natural foraging contexts and spatial discounting tasks than in intertemporal choice tasks. However, little is still known about self-control in invertebrates. Here, we investigate self-control in the black garden ant Lasius niger. We confront individual workers with a spatial discounting task, offering a high-quality reward far from the nest and a poor-quality reward closer to the nest. Most ants (69%) successfully ignored the closer, poorer reward in favour of the further, better one. However, when both the far and the close rewards were of the same quality, most ants (83%) chose the closer feeder, indicating that the ants were indeed exercising self-control, as opposed to a fixation on an already known food source.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | TOOL-USE; SOCIAL INFORMATION; COLONIES; BEHAVIOR; MONKEYS; PIGEONS; FUTURE; FOOD; self-control; spatial discounting; ants; Lasius niger; foraging behaviour; impulsivity |
| Subjects: | 500 Science > 590 Zoological sciences |
| Divisions: | Biology, Preclinical Medicine > Institut für Zoologie > Zoologie/Evolutionsbiologie (Prof. Dr. Jürgen Heinze) |
| Depositing User: | Dr. Gernot Deinzer |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Dec 2018 13:19 |
| Last Modified: | 28 Feb 2019 11:21 |
| URI: | https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/2068 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
