Abstract
Social parasites exploit the brood care behavior of other species and can exert strong selection pressures on their hosts. As a consequence, hosts have developed defenses to circumvent or to lower the costs of parasitism. Recently, a novel, indirect defense trait, termed slave rebellion, has been described for hosts of a slave-making ant: Enslaved Temnothorax longispinosus workers reduce local parasite pressure by regularly killing pupae of their obligatory slavemaking parasite Protomognathus americanus. Subsequently, growth of social parasite nests is reduced, which leads to fewer raids and likely increases fitness of neighboring related host colonies. In this study, we investigate the presence and expression the slave rebellion trait in four communities. We report its presence in all parasitized communities, document strong variation in its expression between different geographic sites and discuss potential explanations for this observed variation.
Highlights
Parasitism is the most common life style on earth and virtually all organisms are affected by it 45 (Price 1980)
We hypothesize that slaves benefit most from killing slave-maker worker pupae, followed by queen pupae and no fitness benefits are expected from the destruction of male pupae of the social parasite. 185 6.Most P. americanus nests are small with an average number of slavemaking workers below five, but we occasionally find very large slavemaking colonies containing up to 50 slavemaking workers in the West Virginia (WV) population (Pamminger unpublished)
Pupal survival varied between communities (p < 0.001 for NY vs OH and p = 0.002 for NY vs WV), with a higher survival in Ohio and West-Virginia than in New York, but this mostly true for the host and less so for the slavemaker
Summary
Parasitism is the most common life style on earth and virtually all organisms are affected by it 45 (Price 1980). Parasites are organisms closely associated with at least one other species (the host), exploiting its resources and harming it in the process. As a consequence of parasite pressure, host species have developed a variety of defensive strategies that limit the impact of parasites. Such defensive adaptations on the host side can lead to counter-adaptations of parasites, a process which may lock both species in a coevolutionary dynamic, potentially escalating in an evolutionary arms race (Dawkins and 55 Krebs 1979). Interactions of host with brood parasites, in ants usually called social parasites, have been suggested as model systems to study such escalating dynamics (Thompson 2005)
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