At its board meeting on Saturday, June 13, the Zoological Society of Japan received candidate recommendations from the Society Award Selection Committee. Following careful deliberation, it was decided that the FY2015 Narishige Zoological Science Promotion Award would be presented to Ryuichi Okada, a member of the School of Human Science and Environment at the University of Hyogo.

Number of applications: 5

Selection Committee for the 2015 Academic Awards and Other Honors
Koji Akasaka, Takahiro Asami, Hiroshi Iida, Taisen Iguchi, Koji Tamura, Kenji Tomioka, Toshiya Matsushima

Reason for winning

Ryuichi Okada: Researcher, School of Human Science and Environment, University of Hyogo
Research Theme: Biological and Mathematical Studies on the Social Behavior of Honeybees: Discovery of the Evolutionary Significance of Behavioral Errors

Reasons for the Recommendation

Honeybees that find a nectar flower communicate the location of the feeding site to their nestmates through the "waggle dance." This is widely known as a discovery by Karl von Frisch (Nobel Prize in 1973). However, it has been a major mystery that the "waggle dance" does not always accurately point to the direction of the flowers, and the transmitted information contains a certain degree of error. Dr. Okada constructed a mathematical simulation treating the behavior of individual honeybees as a Markov process. As a result, he proved that the errors in information transmission increase the frequency of discovering new feeding sites and contribute to the growth of the colony—in other words, the errors have a positive adaptive significance. This research brilliantly integrates theory and observation with a unique perspective and is highly commendable as work that pioneers a new field in ethology.