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Ritualized aggressive behavior reveals distinct social structures in native and introduced range tawny crazy ants.

ABSTRACT: How workers within an ant colony perceive and enforce colony boundaries is a defining biological feature of an ant species. Ants fall along a spectrum of social organizations ranging from single-queen, single nest societies to species with multi-queen societies in which workers exhibit colony-specific, altruistic behaviors towards non-nestmate workers from distant locations. Defining where an ant species falls along this spectrum is critical for understanding its basic ecology. Herein we quantify queen numbers, describe intraspecific aggression, and characterize the distribution of colony sizes for tawny crazy ant (Nylanderia fulva) populations in native range areas in South America as well as in their introduced range in the Southeastern United States. In both ranges, multi-queen nests are common. In the introduced range, aggressive behaviors are absent at all spatial scales tested, indicating that within the population in the Southeastern United States N. fulva is unicolonial. However, this contrasts strongly with intraspecific aggression in its South American native range. In the native range, intraspecific aggression between ants from different nests is common and ritualized. Aggression is typically one-sided and follows a stereotyped sequence of escalating behaviors that stops before actual fighting occurs. Spatial patterns of non-aggressive nest aggregation and the transitivity of non-aggressive interactions demonstrate that results of neutral arena assays usefully delineate colony boundaries. In the native range, both the spatial extent of colonies and the average number of queens encountered per nest differ between sites. This intercontinental comparison presents the first description of intraspecific aggressive behavior for this invasive ant and characterizes the variation in colony organization in the native-range, a pre-requisite to a full understanding of the origins of unicoloniality in its introduced range.

SUBMITTER: LeBrun EG

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6874334 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Ritualized aggressive behavior reveals distinct social structures in native and introduced range tawny crazy ants.

LeBrun Edward G EG Plowes Robert M RM Folgarait Patricia J PJ Bollazzi Martin M Gilbert Lawrence E LE

PloS one 20191122 11

How workers within an ant colony perceive and enforce colony boundaries is a defining biological feature of an ant species. Ants fall along a spectrum of social organizations ranging from single-queen, single nest societies to species with multi-queen societies in which workers exhibit colony-specific, altruistic behaviors towards non-nestmate workers from distant locations. Defining where an ant species falls along this spectrum is critical for understanding its basic ecology. Herein we quantif ...[more]

PMID: 31756233

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Social insects are among the most serious invasive pests in the world, particularly successful at monopolizing environmental resources to outcompete native species and achieve ecological dominance. The invasive success of some social insects is enhanced by their unicolonial structure, under which the presence of numerous queens and the lack of aggression against non-nestmates allow high worker densities, colony growth, and survival while eliminating intra-specific competition. In this study, we investigated the population genetics, colony structure and levels of aggression in the tawny crazy ant, Nylanderia fulva, which was recently introduced into the United States from South America. RESULTS:We found that this species experienced a genetic bottleneck during its invasion lowering its genetic diversity by 60%. Our results show that the introduction of N. fulva is associated with a shift in colony structure. This species exhibits a multicolonial organization in its native range, with colonies clearly separated from one another, whereas it displays a unicolonial system with no clear boundaries among nests in its invasive range. We uncovered an absence of genetic differentiation among populations across the entire invasive range, and a lack of aggressive behaviors towards conspecifics from different nests, even ones separated by several hundreds of kilometers. CONCLUSIONS:Overall, these results suggest that across its entire invasive range in the U.S.A., this species forms a single supercolony spreading more than 2000?km. In each invasive nest, we found several, up to hundreds, of reproductive queens, each being mated with a single male. The many reproductive queens per nests, together with the free movement of individuals between nests, leads to a relatedness coefficient among nestmate workers close to zero in introduced populations, calling into question the stability of this unicolonial system in which indirect fitness benefits to workers is apparently absent.

Dataset Information

Ritualized aggressive behavior reveals distinct social structures in native and introduced range tawny crazy ants.

Publications

Ritualized aggressive behavior reveals distinct social structures in native and introduced range tawny crazy ants.

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