Wendt, Stephanie J. Czaczkes, Tomer Raw Data from Individual ant workers show self-control Often, the first option is not the best. Self-control can allow humans and animals to improve resource intake under such conditions. Self-control in animals is often investigated using intertemporal choice tasks—choosing a smaller reward immediately or a larger reward after a delay. However, intertemporal choice tasks may underestimate self-control, as test subjects may not fully understand the task. Vertebrates show much greater apparent self-control in more natural foraging contexts and spatial discounting tasks than in intertemporal choice tasks. However, little is still known about self-control in invertebrates. Here, we investigate self-control in the black garden ant <i>Lasius niger</i>. We confront individual workers with a spatial discounting task, offering high-quality reward far from the nest and poor-quality reward closer to the nest. Most ants (69%) successfully ignored the closer, poorer reward in favour of the further, better one. However, when both the far and the close rewards were of the same quality, most ants (83%) chose the closer feeder, indicating that the ants were indeed exercising self-control, as opposed to a fixation on an already known food source. self-control;spatial discounting;ants;Lasius niger;foraging behaviour;impulsivity 2017-09-26
    https://rs.figshare.com/articles/dataset/Raw_Data_from_Individual_ant_workers_show_self-control/5441569
10.6084/m9.figshare.5441569.v1