Data from: Measuring site fidelity and spatial segregation within animal societies

1.Animals often display a marked tendency to return to previously-visited locations that contain important resources, such as water, food, or developing brood that must be provisioned. A considerable body of work has demonstrated that this tendency is strongly expressed in ants, which exhibit fidelity to particular sites both inside and outside the nest. However, thus far many studies of this phenomena have taken the approach of reducing an animal's trajectory to a summary statistic, such as the area it covers. 2.Using both simulations of biased random walks, and empirical trajectories from individual rock ants, Temnothorax albipennis, we demonstrate that this reductive approach suffers from an unacceptably high rate of false negatives. 3.To overcome this, we describe a site-centric approach which, in combination with a spatially-explicit null model, allows the identification of the important sites towards which individuals exhibit statistically significant biases. 4.Using the ant trajectories we illustrate how the site-centric approach can be combined with social network analysis tools to detect groups of individuals whose members display similar space-use patterns. 5.We also address the mechanistic origin of individual site fidelity; by examining the sequence of visits to each site, we detect a statistical signature associated with a self-attracting walk - a non-Markovian movement model that has been suggested as a possible mechanism for generating individual site fidelity.1. 动物通常表现出显著的返回曾到访过的、蕴含重要资源（如水、食物或正在发育、需要抚育的幼虫）的地点的倾向。已有大量研究证实，这一倾向在蚂蚁中体现得尤为强烈，蚂蚁会对巢穴内外的特定地点表现出位点忠实性 (site fidelity)。然而迄今为止，针对该现象的诸多研究均采用将动物运动轨迹简化为概括性统计量（如活动覆盖面积）的研究范式。 2. 本研究结合有偏随机游走 (biased random walk) 模拟与个体岩蚁 (Temnothorax albipennis) 的实测运动轨迹，证明该简化研究范式存在高得无法接受的假阴性率。 3. 为克服这一局限，我们提出一种以位点为中心 (site-centric) 的研究方法，结合空间显式 (spatially-explicit) 零模型 (null model)，可识别出个体表现出统计学显著偏向性的重要位点。 4. 以岩蚁的运动轨迹为例，我们展示了该以位点为中心的研究方法如何与社交网络分析工具结合，以检测出具有相似空间利用模式的个体集群。 5. 本研究还探讨了个体位点忠实性的机制起源：通过检视每个位点的到访序列，我们检测到与自吸引游走 (self-attracting walk) 相关的统计学特征——这是一种非马尔可夫 (non-Markovian) 运动模型，此前被提出可作为产生个体位点忠实性的潜在机制。