Nestmate recognition in social insects is sometimes more complex than an individual based decision to accept or reject

摘要

Early work on the setting of acceptance thresholds for nestmate recognition suggested that an overlap between the odor templates used by different colonies could lead to a tradeoff between accepting nestmates and rejecting non-nestmates (Reeve 1989). In a recent paper, we pointed out an alternative approach to this problem (Johnson et al. 2011). We started with a literature review that suggests that rejection of nestmates is exceedingly rare in ants, although it does seem to occur in bees and wasps. Hence, ants do not seem to need to reject their own nestmates in order to exclude non-nestmates. Following this literature review, we suggested that if social insects are using gestalt mechanisms to generate a template of acceptable odors (reviewed by Tsutsui 2004; Martin and Drijfhout 2009), then the concept of overlap between the cues used by different colonies might be of little utility. The relevant question is rather one of errors due to limited sensory acuity. We then interpreted the rejection errors of bees from this perspective and showed that per encounter rejection rates may be part of a more accurate colony level collective decision-making process. Essentially, per encounter rejection rates can amplify over many encounters to a more accurate level of recognition than would be the case for a single interaction. Couvillon et al. (2011), in their commentary on this work, argue that our results are based on false assumptions. We disagree. Couvillon et al. raise three issues with our work, to which we respond below.