Activity Patterns and Age-dependent Changes in Behavior in the Clonal Ant Platythyrea punctata
- PDF / 592,771 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 547.087 x 737.008 pts Page_size
- 92 Downloads / 170 Views
Activity Patterns and Age-dependent Changes in Behavior in the Clonal Ant Platythyrea punctata Clara Hartmann & Julia Haschlar & Jürgen Heinze & Abel Bernadou
Received: 22 September 2019 / Revised: 1 September 2020 / Accepted: 13 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Age-based polyethism, wherein young individuals perform tasks within the nest and later transition to outside activities, is common among many social insects. This division of labor ensures the safety of workers with longer residual lifespans, such as brood caring nurses, and exposes only old individuals to increased extrinsic mortality risks. It appears however, that lifespan in workers is also shaped by intrinsic factors, such as senescence. The transition from nurse to forager is accompanied by various physiological and behavioral changes and seems to represent a crucial step in determining the subsequent life history of the individual. Here we investigate the daily activity pattern and detailed division of labor in colonies of the clonal ant Platythyrea punctata to better understand the dynamics of age polyethism in this peculiar species. We found that P. punctata colonies were mostly active during the day. At night, few workers were observed out of their nests. Workers showed a decrease in brood care and aggressive behavior over time. With increasing age individuals spent more time outside the nest and were more frequently observed walking. However, the transition to outside tasks did not follow a consistent time pattern in all colonies. Workers transitioning at a younger age
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10905-020-09756-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. C. Hartmann : J. Haschlar : J. Heinze : A. Bernadou (*) Zoology / Evolutionary Biology, University of Regensburg, Universitätsstraße 31, 93053 Regensburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
seemed to die earlier than workers that began to forage later in life. Keywords Division of labor . Colony activity . Age polyethism . Lifespan . Platythyrea punctata
Introduction The elaborate division of labor of eusocial insects, such as ants, bees, wasps, and termites, is one important factor responsible for their ecological and evolutionary success (Wilson 1971, 1985; Hölldobler and Wilson 1990). Within a colony, reproduction is allocated to only one or a few highly fertile individuals. Nonreproductive workers perform colony maintenance tasks, such as brood-care, colony defense, and foraging (Oster and Wilson 1978). Non-reproductive division of labor may be associated with variation in body size and morphology, differences in genotype, experience, or social feedback (Jeanson and Weidenmüller 2014). In addition, many eusocial insect species also display temporal or age-based polyethism, wherein workers successively pass through phases of performing specific tasks as they age (Oster and Wilson 1978; Robinson 1992; Beshers and Fewell 2001). Young individuals typically focus on tasks in the n
Data Loading...
