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Discriminatory abilities of facultative slave-making ants and their slaves.

ABSTRACT: Intra-colony odor variability can disturb ants' ability to discriminate against intruders. The evolutionary relevance of this phenomenon can be revealed by studies on colonies of slave-making ants in which the parasite, and not the host, is subject to selection pressures associated with living in a mixed colony. We examined how the European facultative slave-making species Formica sanguinea and its F. fusca slaves perform in discriminating ants from alien colonies. Results of behavioral assays showed that slave-maker ants respond with hostility to conspecific individuals from alien colonies but are relatively tolerant to alien slaves. Furthermore, the behavior of slaves indicated a limited ability to discriminate ants from alien parasitic colonies. The subdivision of colony fragments into mixed and species-separated groups demonstrated that contact with the parasite is necessary for F. fusca slaves to be re-accepted by former nestmates after a period of separation from the stock colony. The results presented in this paper are consistent with the following hypotheses: (1) F. sanguinea ants, as opposed to their slaves, are adapted to discriminate alien individuals in the conditions of odor variability found in a mixed-species colony, (2) the recognition of slaves by F. sanguinea ants involves a dedicated adaptive mechanism that prevents aggression toward them, (3) the odor of slaves is strongly influenced by the parasite with beneficial effect on the colony integrity.

SUBMITTER: Wlodarczyk T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5052306 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Discriminatory abilities of facultative slave-making ants and their slaves.

Włodarczyk T T

Insectes sociaux 20160617 4

Intra-colony odor variability can disturb ants' ability to discriminate against intruders. The evolutionary relevance of this phenomenon can be revealed by studies on colonies of slave-making ants in which the parasite, and not the host, is subject to selection pressures associated with living in a mixed colony. We examined how the European facultative slave-making species <i>Formica sanguinea</i> and its <i>F. fusca</i> slaves perform in discriminating ants from alien colonies. Results of behav ...[more]

PMID: 27773941

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Project description:UNLABELLED: BACKGROUND:Social parasitism is an important selective pressure for social insect species. It is particularly the case for the hosts of dulotic (so called slave-making) ants, which pillage the brood of host colonies to increase the worker force of their own colony. Such raids can have an important impact on the fitness of the host nest. An arms race which can lead to geographic variation in host defenses is thus expected between hosts and parasites. In this study we tested whether the presence of a social parasite (the dulotic ant Myrmoxenus ravouxi) within an ant community correlated with a specific behavioral defense strategy of local host or non-host populations of Temnothorax ants. Social recognition often leads to more or less pronounced agonistic interactions between non-nestmates ants. Here, we monitored agonistic behaviors to assess whether ants discriminate social parasites from other ants. It is now well-known that ants essentially rely on cuticular hydrocarbons to discriminate nestmates from aliens. If host species have evolved a specific recognition mechanism for their parasite, we hypothesize that the differences in behavioral responses would not be fully explained simply by quantitative dissimilarity in cuticular hydrocarbon profiles, but should also involve a qualitative response due to the detection of particular compounds. We scaled the behavioral results according to the quantitative chemical distance between host and parasite colonies to test this hypothesis. RESULTS:Cuticular hydrocarbon profiles were distinct between species, but host species did not show a clearly higher aggression rate towards the parasite than toward non-parasite intruders, unless the degree of response was scaled by the chemical distance between intruders and recipient colonies. By doing so, we show that workers of the host and of a non-host species in the parasitized site displayed more agonistic behaviors (bites and ejections) towards parasite than toward non-parasite intruders. CONCLUSIONS:We used two different analyses of our behavioral data (standardized with the chemical distance between colonies or not) to test our hypothesis. Standardized data show behavioral differences which could indicate qualitative and specific parasite recognition. We finally stress the importance of considering the whole set of potentially interacting species to understand the coevolution between social parasites and their hosts.

Dataset Information

Discriminatory abilities of facultative slave-making ants and their slaves.

Publications

Discriminatory abilities of facultative slave-making ants and their slaves.

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