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Who goes there? Social surveillance as a response to intergroup conflict in a primitive termite

ABSTRACT: Intergroup conflict has been suggested as a major force shaping the evolution of social behaviour in animal groups. A long-standing hypothesis is that groups at risk of attack by rivals should become more socially cohesive, to increase resilience or protect against future attack. However, it is usually unclear how cohesive behaviours (such as grooming or social contacts) function in intergroup conflict. We performed an experiment in which we exposed young colonies of the dampwood termite, Zootermopsis angusticollis, to a rival colony while preventing physical combat with a permeable barrier. We measured social contacts, allogrooming and trophallaxis before, during and after exposure. Termites showed elevated rates of social contacts during exposure to a rival compared to the pre-exposure phase, but rates returned to pre-exposure levels after colonies were separated for 9 days. There was evidence of a delayed effect of conflict on worker trophallaxis. We suggest that social contacts during intergroup conflict function as a form of social surveillance, to check individual identity and assess colony resource holding potential. Intergroup conflict may increase social cohesion in both the short and the long term, improving the effectiveness of groups in competition.

SUBMITTER: Thompson F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7423038 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Intergroup conflict is widespread in nature and is proposed to have strong impacts on the evolution of social behavior. The conflict-cohesion hypothesis predicts that exposure to intergroup conflict should lead to increased social cohesion to improve group success or resilience in future conflicts. There is evidence to support this prediction from studies of affiliative responses to outgroup threats in some animal societies. However, most of these studies have focused on behavioral changes over short time periods (minutes and hours after exposure to an outgroup), and hence very little is known about the dynamics and durability of responses to intergroup conflict over the longer term. We investigated this question by simulating intergroup encounters in wild banded mongooses (Mungos mungo) and measuring social behavior before, during, and after these encounters over a 5-day period. We also ran control trials with non-threatening stimuli. Banded mongooses reacted immediately to intrusion stimuli by vocalizing, grouping together, and advancing on the stimulus. In the first 5 min after simulated intrusions, we saw an elevation in grooming levels, but in the hour after exposure grooming rates declined sharply, contrary to our expectation. In the two subsequent days, grooming rates remained at this depressed rate. In control trials, the initial increase in grooming was not seen, but grooming declined compared to the longer-term time periods. Grooming changed across time, but not in the same pattern as during intrusions, suggesting that intrusions had an impact above and beyond that of the experimental setup. The dynamics of grooming responses were short lived and more complex than we initially expected. We suggest this unexpected result may be linked to the frequency of aggressive intergroup encounters in this system. As control and experimental trials were run at different times of year, future work would be needed to confirm that these relative patterns are replicable. Our results indicate short-lived impacts of outgroup threat on measures of social cohesion in this species, but cannot confirm longer-term changes.

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Who goes there? Social surveillance as a response to intergroup conflict in a primitive termite

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