群体内个体行为的差异会导致群体之间的功能差异,特别是在社交动物中。然而,个体行为表型如何转化为群体表型尚不清楚.这里,我们调查个体行为类型是否会影响社会物种中的群体表现,蚂蚁阿巴诺加斯特仙人掌。我们测量了个体行为特征,并创建了具有相似行为类型的工人群体,高探索性或低探索性工人。我们在四个不同的小组中测试了这些小组,生态相关,任务:对入侵者的反应,从迷宫中获取猎物,巢穴搬迁和工具使用。我们证明,与低探索性工人群体相比,高探索性的工人群体对入侵者更具攻击性,更有效地收集猎物,更快地进行嵌套重定位,并且更有可能执行工具使用。我们的研究结果表明,蚂蚁的个体行为和集体行为之间存在着密切的联系。这支持了群体动力学的“行为类型假设”,这表明个人在社会环境中的行为反映了其自身的行为类型。因此,可以从单个组成员的行为类型来预测组的平均行为表型。
Differences in individual behaviour within a group can give rise to functional dissimilarities between groups, particularly in social animals. However, how individual behavioural phenotypes translate into the group phenotype remains unclear. Here, we investigate whether individual behavioural type affects group performance in a eusocial species, the ant Aphaenogaster senilis. We measured individual behavioural traits and created groups of workers with similar behavioural type, either high-exploratory or low-exploratory workers. We tested these groups in four different, ecologically relevant, tasks: reaction to an intruder, prey retrieval from a maze, nest relocation and tool use. We show that, compared to groups of low-exploratory workers, groups of high-exploratory workers were more aggressive towards intruders, more efficient in collecting prey, faster in nest relocation and more likely to perform tool use. Our results demonstrate a strong link between individual and collective behaviour in ants. This supports the \'behavioural type hypothesis\' for group dynamics, which suggests that an individual\'s behaviour in a social environment reflects its own behavioural type. The average behavioural phenotype of a group can therefore be predicted from the behavioural types of individual group members.