IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/beheco/v22y2011i6p1149-1153.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A case of mental time travel in ant-following birds?

Author

Listed:
  • Corina J. Logan
  • Sean O'Donnell
  • Nicola S. Clayton

Abstract

Army ant-following birds that inspect bivouacs (temporary nests of nomadic army ants) might provide a novel candidate for studying elements of mental time travel in animals, namely the ability to 1) remember the time and place of specific past events and 2) to use this memory to plan for future actions. Army ant colonies are a rich but unpredictable resource: Army ants do not raid every day, and colonies cycle through periods of high and low raid activity. Birds check bivouacs in the afternoon after feeding on insects that flee the army ant raids and then return to the bivouac the next morning to observe ant activity. If the ants are raiding, the birds will follow the army ants to the front of the raid and begin feeding; if not, the birds must move on to another army ant colony. Do ant-following birds check bivouacs to encode the location in their memory, thereby allowing them to return the next morning to feed again? Ant-following birds may track multiple army ant colonies through space and time to ensure a daily meal on an otherwise scattered and unpredictable resource. We suggest further research to test this hypothesis and provide a framework for investigating whether or not cognitive processes involved in mental time travel play a role in bivouac-checking behavior observed in the field. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Corina J. Logan & Sean O'Donnell & Nicola S. Clayton, 2011. "A case of mental time travel in ant-following birds?," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 22(6), pages 1149-1153.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:22:y:2011:i:6:p:1149-1153
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arr104
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:22:y:2011:i:6:p:1149-1153. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/beheco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.