Waggle Dance - Controversy

Controversy

The Dance Language vs. The Waggle Dance

As defined by von Frisch, Tanzsprache (German for "dance language") is the information about direction, distance, and quality of a resource (such as food or nesting sites) contained within the waggle dance. Though von Frisch insisted on the direct connection between the Tanzsprache and the performance of the waggle dance, recent criticism holds that potential foragers need not correctly translate the dance language from the waggle dance to successfully forage. In an experiment on the honeybee Apis mellifera, most individuals who thoroughly followed a waggle dance ignored the resource direction and location information. Instead, 93% of the foragers returned to foraging areas they had previous knowledge of.

Bees that follow a waggle dance can successfully forage without decoding the dance language information in several ways:

• Dance follower may use olfactory information from the dancer and find either the same resource or a different one with a similar scent.
• Following a dance may simply trigger foraging behavior. A forager may then search randomly for resources.
• Following a dance may reactivate private knowledge of a resource. After reactivation, the forager may return to the known resource.
• Using information communicated in the waggle dance is more useful to foragers when private information about resources is lacking.

Is Dance Language a Language?

The use of the word “language” may lead to misrepresentations of the waggle dance. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a system of language a sign is made up two chief components. The signifier is the physical or phonetic representation of a sign. The signified is the conceptual component. If the dance language followed the Saussurian dyadic model of semiotics, the signifier would be the waggle dance and the signified would be the location of the foraging resource. Though the dance language may or may not follow this sort of pattern, it is not considered to be a language with syntactical grammar or a set of symbols.

Efficiency and Adaptation

The waggle dance may be less efficient than once thought. Some bees observe over 50 waggle runs without successfully foraging, while others will forage successfully after observing 5 runs.

The waggle dance may be adaptive in some environments and not in others. In temperate habitats, honey bee colonies routinely perform the waggle dance, but can still successfully forage when the dance is experimentally obscured. In tropical habitats, honey bee foraging is severely impaired if waggle dancing is prevented. This is thought to be due to the patchiness of resources in tropical environment versus the homogeneity of resources in temperate environments. In the tropics, food resources can come in the form of flowering trees which are rich in nectar but are scattered sparsely and bloom only briefly. Thus, in tropical zones information about forage location might be more valuable than in temperate zones.