Does Imprecision in The Waggle Dance Fit Patterns Predicted by The Tuned-Error Hypothesis?

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Abstract

The waggle dance of the honey bee is used to recruit nest mates to a resource, though direction indicated for a resource may vary greatly within a single dance. Some authors suggest that this variation exits as an adaptation to distribute recruits across a patch of flowers, and that, due to the variation’s inverse relationship with distance, the shape of the recruit distribution will remain constant for resources at different distances. In this study, we test this hypothesis by examining how variation in the indication of direction and distance changes with respect to distance. We find that imprecision in the communication of direction does not diminish rapidly enough to accommodate an adaptive-error hypothesis, and we also find that variation in the indication of distance has a positive relationship with the distance of a resource from the hive.

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The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme.

R Lewontin, Richard C. Lewontin, Kevin Gould (1979)

An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States during the past 40 years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an oragnism into unitary 'traits' and proposing an adaptive story for each considered separately. Trade-offs among competing selective demands exert the only brake upon perfection; non-optimality is thereby rendered as a result of adaptation as well. We criticize this approach and attempt to reassert a competing notion (long popular in continental Europe) that organisms must be analysed as integrated wholes, with Baupläne so constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of development and general architecture that the constraints themselves become more interesting and more important in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs. We fault the adaptationist programme for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin (male tyrannosaurs may have used their diminutive front legs to titillate female partners, but this will not explain why they got so small); for its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; for its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales; and for its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of non-adaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features (allometry, pleiotropy, material compensation, mechanically forced correlation), the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of non-adaptive structures. We support Darwin's own pluralistic approach to identifying the agents of evolutionary change.

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Honeybee colonies achieve fitness through dancing.

Susan G. Sherman, P. T. Visscher (2002)

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.