Abstract
Access to resources depends on an individual's position within the environment. This is particularly important to animals that invest heavily in nest construction, such as social insects. Many ant species have a polydomous nesting strategy: a single colony inhabits several spatially separated nests, often exchanging resources between the nests. Different nests in a polydomous colony potentially have differential access to resources, but the ecological consequences of this are unclear. In this study, we investigate how nest survival and budding in polydomous wood ant (Formica lugubris) colonies are affected by being part of a multi‐nest system. Using field data and novel analytical approaches combining survival models with dynamic network analysis, we show that the survival and budding of nests within a polydomous colony are affected by their position in the nest network structure. Specifically, we find that the flow of resources through a nest, which is based on its position within the wider nest network, determines a nest's likelihood of surviving and of founding new nests. Our results highlight how apparently disparate entities in a biological system can be integrated into a functional ecological unit. We also demonstrate how position within a dynamic network structure can have important ecological consequences.
Highlights
An individual’s access to resources is strongly influenced by its position in the environment relative to that resource
We investigated the dynamics of the nest networks of the polydomous red wood ant Formica lugubris, a member of the ecologically important F. rufa species group (Stockan & Robinson, 2016; Stockan et al, 2016)
We examined how the nest networks of thirteen polydomous wood ant colonies changed over time
Summary
An individual’s access to resources is strongly influenced by its position in the environment relative to that resource. Access to food will depend on their nests’ location within the stable foraging environment and on their nests’ position in the nest network structure. In a monodomous colony (a colony inhabiting a single nest), the survival and budding of a nest are affected only by properties inherent to that nest, such as its size and location in the environment. Nests within a polydomous system may survive and bud based only on their inherent properties, with no ecological consequences of the nest network structure. If the nests of a polydomous system are part of the same functional unit, the survival and budding of each nest will be affected by inherent nest properties, and by either its position in the colony nest network or more general colony-level effects. The ecological consequences of differential access to resources within a polydomous colony will give important insights into how polydomous colonies are structured and, more generally, the potential importance of an individual’s position within a dynamic network
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