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During about 30 years, since a student, I have been plunged into two themes, namely, complex behaviour & communication in social insects and behavioural aspects of social processes in their communities. I firstly discovered interspecies learning by imitation in ants and interspecies hierarchy in ant communities. Then a new form of interspecies relations was invented, named "interspecies social control". I experimentally proved that ants of dominant species are able to estimate quite precisely the quantity of "superfluous" subdominants and delete them. At the same time they keep in reserve a definite amount of subdominants on their common feeding territory, because these more agile species serve as "producers" for dominating "scroungers", when dominants need to search for food in complex situations. I also conducted a wide geographical and faunistic research in 70-80th inspecting the valleys of Irtysch and some of tributaries (the Ishim,the Ui, the Tui, the Tara,the Char) and of some rivers flowing into Balkhash Lake and Zaysan Lake (the Ayaguz, the Kurchum, the Kolguti, the Black Irtysch,the Ile) as well as the Alakol and Balkhash hollows. Much of my recent work on communication was done in collaboration with well-known specialist in Information Theory Prof. Boris Ryabko. This part of work may be named " Ants and Bits". Using ideas of Information Theory, we discovered a sophisticated "language" in ants, even more intricate than well-known Dance Language in Honey Bee. During the last decade, with my students, we are studying how the ants use their communicative and cognitive skills in their inter-relations with other invertebrates such as carabids, aphids, springtails. We revealed the role of ants as "tutors" in consortiums: the ants organise the living space for other invertebrates and "teach" them how to behave in intercommunity. The methodology requires living insect communities in natural situations as well as laboratory cultures. The main point of my approach is putting insects into dramatic situations in field and laboratory experiments in order to estimate their capacities to solve natural problems such as searching for food and refuges, avoidance of conflicts and consensus with symbionts. My lab (see photo) Recently 6 PhD students defended their PhD Theses accomplished under my supervision. Presently, my laboratory of community ethology presently includes 5 researchers, 3 PhD students and 4 postgraduate students. Some of them are: Sophia Panteleeva, Ph.D., reseacher Helen Dorosheva, Ph.D., researcher Tatyana Novgorodova, Ph.D., researcher Elena Sleptzova, a former PhD students of mine, currently a Dean of Ecological Department of the University in Myrnyi, Yakutia. Ivan Yakovlev, PhD student. Olga Birukova, PhD student. Anton Gavriluk, PhD student. The three main topics of current interest are: I. A new tool to find news: Information theory approach for experimental studying of animal language and intelligence (IN COOPERATION WITH Prof. BORIS RYABKO The communication systems of animals have been a matter of special research interest to ethologists. The ability of language behaviour in animals is one of the best manifestations of intelligence closely related to their social life. Although it is intuitively clear that many high social species have to possess complex language, only two types of natural communications have been decoded, namely honey bee dance language and acoustic signals of vervet monkeys and of several other species. The main difficulties in the analysis of animal language appear to be methodological. Many workers have tried to directly decode animal language by looking for "letters" and "words" and by compiling "dictionaries". The fact that scientists have managed to compile such "dictionaries" for a few species only, appears to indicate not that other animals lack language, but that adequate methods are lacking. It is natural to use ideas of information Theory in investigation of natural languages, because this theory presents general principles and methods for developing effective and reliable communicative systems. We suggest to discuss principles and schemes providing quantitative characteristics of communicative systems and important properties of animal intelligence. The main point of our approach is not to decipher signals but to investigate just the process of information transmission by measuring time duration which the animals spend on transmitting messages of definite lengths and complexities. Based on these ideas, we recently have revealed symbolic language and numerical competence in several group retrieving aphid-farming ant species. They have probably an even more intricate form of communication than does the honeybee and also a high level of mental abilities. Ants are able to memorise and transmit messages concerning sequence of turns towards a hidden trough of syrup and to use the simplest regularities to compress the information. It is a great challenge to extend these experimental schemes and approaches for studying other species. II. Social complexity in insects societies: ants as "tutors" for invertebrates sharing their feeding territories Ants' species communities, with the dominance of Formica s.str. species, may be considered as peculiar organizing matrixes for shaping life space and resource partitioning for other invertebrates. Ant-hills of red wood ants grant high-grade deposit of food and shelters for high diversity of species and thus create the engineered patches of habitat. The reverse side of ants' engineering is that within their large feeding territories they may create the "black holes" in the habitat, i.e. areas of high dangerous for many species, where intruders run risks of death or at least of injury. Investigation of the abilities of individual species to persist dangerous patches finding a trade-off between risks and resource consuming likely to become not less important in the determination in the particular set of species than studying of re-colonisation of inhabited patches. Recently the field and laboratory experiments on behavioural mechanisms of inter-relations between different ant species with their symbionts and competitors, in dependence of hierarchical structure of ant communities are carried out. The following hypotheses are examined: 1. Ants' investment in prosperity of myrmecophilous aphids depends on a level of ant social organization which is based on specific features of colony design and foraging system. Dominant ant species possessing the most complex behavioural patterns of inter-relations with symbiotic aphid species, make the main investment into biotic potential of aphid populations, while subdominants ( Serviformica) and influents ( Myrmica, Lasius, Tetramorium) get the fruits of these inter-relation using different strategies including cleptoparasitism. 2. Dominant ant species accumulate in their anthills the great numbers of springtails during inclement seasons and that serve as a reserve of prey for influent ant species in favourable periods when springtails move widely from the large ant - hills. 3. Anthills themselves and foraging roots of red wood ants organize a living space for other predatory invertebrates dwelling in litter and on soil surface, in particular, for carabids. Inter-relations between ants and predatory carabids are based on learning processes and flexible behaviour with regard to food patches. III. Task distribution in ants' colonies: give them a complex task and observe cliques. Task distribution in colonies of eusocial animals is a matter of special research interest as the main mechanism in establishing self- organisation. It is well known that social insects use task partitioning at a level of functional groups of workers that manage different work. This concerns the collection of food and other materials, nest excavation and some other tasks. The existence of "teams" ("cliques", "squads") within insect colonies, possibly based on individual identification, is one of discussible issues in studying of social behaviour. The question of constant membership and individual recognition within "cliques" in ant colonies has been so far obscure. It seems that the most likely situation to observe team task distribution is to place a colony in jeopardy, for example, under shortage of resources that may be obtained only through solving a rather complex problem. Actually, our findings of effectively working "cliques" in group- retrieving species are connected with the discovery of a sophisticated communicative system. This was possible to reveal only in a situation when prosperity of a colony strongly depended on effectiveness of foraging organisation. For example, in our experiments with a binary tree laboratory ants were fed only once in two days and only in the labyrinth. During preliminary stage of the experiments the ants were fed in the maze with one fork. In this case it was impossible to observe any structural units within large ants groups crowded around the trough with syrup. But the ants' behaviour was sharply changed with following a complication of the task. Thus, when the trough with syrup was placed on one of four "leaves" of the second turn of the binary tree, it was easy to observe "teams" , which had 1 scout and 4-8 recruits: the scout attracted to food only it's constant team, and the team was waiting in the nest only for their scout. A choice of modelling species was important. It is known that the organisation of workforce is limited by comparatively simple rules in many species. The majority of ants' species are known to use low-end communicative ways for recruitment: chemical trails, sound signals, tandems etc. Group retrieving species must cope with a variety of tasks and some of them require rather complex communication. Recently we have progressed in understanding how dies this sophisticated communicative system based on team-structure works in nature. It turned out that in red-wood ant species, in order to obtain honeydew, a permanent foraging group of 5 - 10 specimens has to search for a certain leaf with an aphid colony within such a huge three - dimensioned space as a crown of a tree is for an ant. In the current project individual inter-relations within ants' working groups, which were not analysed before, are considered in the light of task partition in colonies and division of labour within cliques. We are trying to determine what are the different mechanisms involved in the choice of foraging strategies in species possessing different colony designs and facing with situations of different levels of complexity. New experimental approach were performed and were completed with field experiments showing the deep relation between processes of self-organisation in ants' colony and complexity of the problem to be solved. |