Abstract
In this study, we investigated the effect of starvation on the feeding behavior of the ant Tapinoma nigerrimum. In particular, we tested the response of ants that had experienced different levels of starvation, toward sucrose solutions of increasing concentration. As expected, starved ants promptly reacted to the sugary food sources with a higher rate of acceptance as compared to satiated ones. Acceptance increased both with sugar concentration and the length of the starvation period. However, a consistent fraction of the starved ants did not feed on the solutions, suggesting that starvation had different effects on different individuals, even though they all had food ad libitum before the beginning of the tests, had comparable body sizes, and were collected from the same trail. The different acceptance of sugary solutions may be, therefore, merely because ants fed on the experimental food at different times. Interestingly, in all the experimental groups, ants appeared to satiate quickly, irrespective of the solution tested and fasting duration. This would suggest that the rate of ingestion was independent of these factors, a result partially at odds with previous studies. This study is one of the few ones dealing with the behavioral response of an ant species to a famine event.
Highlights
Finding enough food is a central challenge for all the organisms
In this study, we investigated the effect of starvation on the feeding behavior of the ant Tapinoma nigerrimum
When resource supply is low, ant colonies may put in place collective behaviors to counterbalance food shortage, as it happens in Lasius niger, in which the number of scouts that spontaneously leave the nest even in the absence of chemical or tactile signals increases in times of famine (Mailleux et al, 2010)
Summary
Finding enough food is a central challenge for all the organisms. In social insects, the amount of collected food must counterbalance both individuals and collective requirements, following the ‘altruistic’ rules dictated by the inclusive fitness (Abbot et al, 2011). In Aphaenogaster picea, for example, starvation reduces individual thermal tolerance (Nguyen et al.,2017), while in Formica exsecta, protracted food shortage affect the tissue-specific gene expression and impairs the efficiency of the tissues involved in the degradation of bacterial cell walls, melanization, and the encapsulation response (Bos et al, 2016). All these effects may, in turn, elicit cascade effects as decreased brood and nest hygiene (Dussutour et al, 2016), or unbalance interspecific interactions and facilitate the success of the species more resistant to the lack of food, as observed in Linepithema humile (McGrannachan & Lester, 2013). Many details of the ecological and behavioral responses of ants to food shortage have been studied in the
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