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Social Hymenopterans as Reliable Agents for Information Transmission

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Studying Animal Languages Without Translation: An Insight from Ants

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Abstract

The majority of models consider cognitive skills and individual interactions in social insects redundant, and assume that their behaviour is governed mainly by collective decision making. However, social hymenopterans are capable of abstraction, extrapolation and solving rather sophisticated discrimination tasks at the individual level, and this is closely connected with their mode of communication. In ants, the distribution of cognitive responsibilities among individuals depends on which recruitment strategies they use, as well as on the level of social organisation within their family. Unlike mass-recruiting and solely foraging ant species, highly social group-retrieving species can transfer exact information between colony members by means of distant homing, that is, transfer messages about remote events.

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  1. Institute of Systematics and Ecology of Animals of SB RAS, Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russia

    Zhanna Reznikova

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  1. Zhanna Reznikova
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Reznikova, Z. (2017). Social Hymenopterans as Reliable Agents for Information Transmission. In: Studying Animal Languages Without Translation: An Insight from Ants. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44918-0_3

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