Abstract
Simple SummaryGrooming is a common behavior in animals. It serves the function of removing foreign materials and excessive amounts of self-secreted materials from the body’s surface. Social insects, such as honeybees or ants, use various types of pheromones, some of which propagate information about the environment to conspecific individuals, for chemical communication. The individuals that receive such information can respond with suitable behaviors to protect themselves and their society. Hence, grooming is important for the maintenance of the correct performance of their sensory organs on antennae for pheromone perception. Here, we experimentally limited self-grooming of the antennae in workers of the Japanese carpenter ant (Camponotus japonicus) by removing a pair of antennal cleaning apparatuses from the forelegs and investigated their behavioral change in response to exposure to the alarm pheromone or to encounters with nestmates or non-nestmates. Comparisons between self-grooming-nonlimited and self-grooming-limited ants showed that the self-grooming-limited ants gradually exhibited decreased locomotion activity in their fight-or-flight response to the alarm pheromone and experienced increased failure in nestmate and non-nestmate discrimination. Thus, the results of the present study suggest that antennal sensory system maintenance supports social communication, which is indispensable not only to the individual workers but also to the survival of their society.Self-grooming of the antennae is frequently observed in ants. This antennal maintenance behavior is presumed to be essential for effective chemical communication but, to our knowledge, this has not yet been well studied. When we removed the antenna-cleaning apparatuses of the Japanese carpenter ant (C. japonicus) to limit the self-grooming of the antennae, the worker ants demonstrated the self-grooming gesture as usual, but the antennal surface could not be sufficiently cleaned. By using scanning electron microscopy with NanoSuit, we observed the ants’ antennae for up to 48 h and found that the antennal surfaces gradually became covered with self-secreted surface material. Concurrently, the self-grooming-limited workers gradually lost their behavioral responsiveness to undecane—the alarm pheromone. Indeed, their locomotive response to the alarm pheromone diminished for up to 24 h after the antenna cleaner removal operation. In addition, the self-grooming-limited workers exhibited less frequent aggressive behavior toward non-nestmate workers, and 36 h after the operation, approximately half of the encountered non-nestmate workers were accepted as nestmates. These results suggest that the antennal sensing system is affected by excess surface material; hence, their proper function is prevented until they are cleaned.
Highlights
Grooming is a common behavior in many terrestrial animals
C. japonicus worker ants were individually held with forceps and both forelegs were cut with micro-scissors at the femur–tibia joint so that the antenna cleaner apparatus, consisting of the tarsal notches and the tibial spurs, were completely removed; contrarily, in the sham operation, the forelegs were cut, but the antenna cleaner apparatuses were preserved
We demonstrated that large amounts of surface material accumulated on the ungroomed antennae of C. japonicus
Summary
Grooming is a common behavior in many terrestrial animals. Grooming occurs when an animal is in a stressed state [14,15,16,17]. Self-grooming of animal antennae is important for the olfactory function and olfactory sense-involved behaviors. When cockroaches are unable to groom their antennae, they become significantly less responsive to periplanone-B, a sex pheromone component [18]; antennae grooming may facilitate courtship performance in cockroaches [19]. Antennal grooming may serve a similar function in a wide range of insect species despite their different grooming styles. Sensory organs may need to be regularly groomed to maintain their responsiveness to the environment of various species [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]
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