Hymenopteran Collective Foraging and Information Transfer about Resources 2012
1Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal do Pará, Rua Augusto Corrêa, N° 1, Campus Básico, 66075-110 Belém, PA, Brazil
2Section of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, Division of Biological Sciences, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, MC0116, La Jolla, CA 92093-0116,USA
3Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI), School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QG, UK
Hymenopteran Collective Foraging and Information Transfer about Resources 2012
Description
Social insect foraging and the transfer of information about the location and quality of food and other resources, such as building materials and potential nesting sites, continues to be a topic of intense research and interest in biology. Recent advances show that some social insect species (ants, bees, and wasps) can stimulate nestmates to forage and communicate food source location through several mechanisms, including visual local enhancement, scent trails, dance communication in Apis species. By understanding the mechanisms and the patterns of collective foraging within the social insects, we may reach a deeper understanding of their ecology and the important role they play as pollinators and predators. We invite investigators to contribute both original research and review articles that will stimulate continuing efforts to understand the patterns of collective foraging and resource communication in social insects.
In particular, we are interested in articles that improve our understanding of task partitioning in foraging, mechanisms used to provide information about resource location and quality, how individuals transfer this information to nestmates, how collective colony foraging arises and is coordinated, how foragers deal with exploitation by competitors, and other current topics in collective foraging. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: Recent developments and new understanding of:
- The implications of the waggle dance and other dances for resource exploitation in Apis spp
- The spatial-temporal characteristics of scent trails
- Sounds and vibrations as mediators of food source communication
- Mechanisms used to explore collectively a food source
- Economics of social foraging behavior
- Mechanisms used to select collectively and to occupy a nesting site
- Evolution of nesting structure to fit communication modalities
- Task partitioning in the collective foraging
- Novel methodologies to study collective foraging and food source communication
- How prior experience and learning or both affect communication
- The interaction between communication and the environment (i.e., why is one communication mode favored or adaptive in one environment but not in another)
Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/psyche/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: