D3211: The effects of social behavior training on ant work patterns in Camponotus floridanus

Coordination is advantageous for the foraging sector of the ant colony resulting in the ability of forager ants to recruit nestmates into foraging behavior by communicating quality, quantity, and location of distant food sources. For navigation, foragers rely on visual, olfactory, and idiothetic cues. They process the location of odors and landmarks while secreting a pheromone trail connecting the nest to the food source. Once the food is gathered, it is stored in the ant crop and the pheromone trial is then used to relocate the nest entrance. It has also been observed that Cataglyphis noda ants can use magnetic and vibrational landmarks as nest-defining cues. Regarding the complex sensory modalities that ants use, there are only a few studies that observe the results of altering one or a few navigational cues. Our main goal for this investigation is to observe possible changes to foraging patterns after altering visual cues using color assortments. We built an arena to experimentally train two groups of ants while eliminating initial biases. Both groups were observed in a blue color environment where one group always found food and the other never found food. At the end of training, the arena was expanded to include a green color environment and we recorded the resulting movements of the foraging ants.