Abstract
AbstractIn ants, individuals live in tightly integrated units (colonies) and work collectively for its success. In such groups, stable intraspecific variation in behaviour within or across contexts (personality) can occur at two levels: individuals and colonies. This paper examines how colony size and nestmate density influence the collective exploratory behaviour of Formica fusca (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), in the laboratory. The housing conditions of the colonies were manipulated to vary the size of colonies and their densities under a fully factorial design. The results demonstrate the presence of colony behavioural repeatability in this species, and contrary to our expectations, colonies were more explorative on average when they were kept at lower nestmate densities. We also found that experimental colonies created from larger source colonies were more explorative, which conveys that a thorough understanding of the contemporary behaviour of a colony may require knowing its social history and how it was formed. Our results also convey that the colony size and nestmate density can have significant effects on the exploratory behaviour of ant colonies.
Highlights
Ants are considered one of the evolutionarily most successful taxa, with more than 13,000 described species (Bolton, 2019) exhibiting diverse social organizations (Hölldobler & Wilson, 1990)
The study aimed to explore the extent to which F. fusca colonies exhibit temporal among-colony repeatability in their collective exploratory tendencies and how these tendencies are affected by the size of the colonies and the densities of workers within the nests
Consistent with this prediction, between-colony differences in collective foraging activity have been linked with colony success in several species of ants (e.g. Kühbandner, Modlmeier, & Foitzik, 2014, Modlmeier & Foitzik, 2011, Gordon, 2013, Bengston, Shin, & Dornhaus, 2017, Carere, Audebrand, Rödel, & d’Ettorre, 2018)
Summary
Ants are considered one of the evolutionarily most successful taxa, with more than 13,000 described species (Bolton, 2019) exhibiting diverse social organizations (Hölldobler & Wilson, 1990). Fluctuations in colony size can influence the density of nestmates (number of individuals per nest size) which can be another key parameter affecting within-nest dynamics (Perna & Theraulaz, 2017) These aspects are rarely examined in social insects under laboratory circumstances (but see in Cao & Dornhaus, 2008; Gordon, Paul, & Thorpe, 1993; Modlmeier et al, 2019; Pie, Rosengaus, & Traniello, 2004). We predicted that the level of exploratory behaviour would be more intense in large and dense F. fusca colonies
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