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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on May 19, 2008
Behavioral Ecology 2008 19(5):984-989; doi:10.1093/beheco/arn057
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Sector fidelity—an advantageous foraging behavior resulting from a heuristic search strategy

Eva Maria Buchkremer and Klaus Reinhold

Department of Evolutionary Biology, University Bielefeld, Morgenbreede 45, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany

Address correspondence to K. Reinhold. E-mail: klaus.reinhold{at}uni-bielefeld.de.


  Abstract

The desert ant Cataglyphis exhibits a strong tendency toward returning to its previous foraging direction when the last foraging run was successful. This behavior is called sector fidelity. A very simple behavioral rule, the {tau}-rule, has previously been identified as the possible underlying mechanism. Up to now, sector fidelity has been considered a means of facilitating navigation by exploiting familiar landmark information. We propose that sector fidelity enhances the foraging success of ants or other animals in an environment with a heterogeneous resource distribution. We tested the {tau}-rule and another promising behavioral rule in a very simple environment and modeled the foraging success of these strategies. For each condition, the parameters of the 2 heuristics were optimized using an evolutionary algorithm. The results of our simulations show that the {tau}-rule performs very well under different resource distributions and availabilities. It can therefore function as a very general adaptive foraging strategy for finding prey in landscapes with heterogeneous resource distributions.

Key words: Cataglyphis, heuristic, optimal foraging, sector fidelity.

Received 15 January 2008; revised 11 April 2008; accepted 22 April 2008.


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