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P Kirk Visscher

Publications and source records attributed to P Kirk Visscher.

3 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2007

Group decision making in nest-site selection among social insects.

The choice of a new nest site is ecologically critical for an insect colony. In swarm-founding social insects, or those that move as colonies from one site to another, this choice is one of the best-available examples of a distributed, nonhierarchical decision-making process in animals. In the few species of ants and bees that have been studied in detail, the main features of this collective decision making are strikingly similar, although some differences occur. Individual scouts discover potential nest sites and integrate multiple properties of these sites into assessments of their quality. The discovered sites then compete for a limited pool of nest-site scouts, and attrition of less-favored sites occurs by several mechanisms. Finally, the mass movement of the colony to the new site is triggered by a quorum-sensing mechanism when sufficient scouts are present at one of the alternatives. Movement itself is coordinated by different mechanisms in different insects.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

Honeybee colonies achieve fitness through dancing.

The honeybee dance language, in which foragers perform dances containing information about the distance and direction to food sources, is the quintessential example of symbolic communication in non-primates. The dance language has been the subject of controversy, and of extensive research into the mechanisms of acquiring, decoding and evaluating the information in the dance. The dance language has been hypothesized, but not shown, to increase colony food collection. Here we show that colonies with disoriented dances (lacking direction information) recruit less effectively to syrup feeders than do colonies with oriented dances. For colonies foraging at natural sources, the direction information sometimes increases food collected, but at other times it makes no difference. The food-location information in the dance is presumably important when food sources are hard to find, variable in richness and ephemeral. Recruitment based simply on arousal of foragers and communication of floral odour, as occurs in honeybees, bumble bees and some stingless bees, can be equally effective under other circumstances. Clarifying the condition-dependent payoffs of the dance language provides new insight into its function in honeybee ecology.

Animal Communication↗