Abstract
Aggression bioassays were used to investigate how fire ant workers ‘match’ perceived odour labels of encountered individuals with a learned template of nestmate odours. A split-colony design was used, with parent colonies and subcolonies receiving different diets. Diets either shared all components, shared some components but contained no unshared components, or contained both shared and unshared components. Results suggest that workers ‘compared their colony odour template with labels of encountered kin by ‘overall similarity’ rather than by a ‘discrete odour’ mechanism requiring either (1) exact cue correspondence between templates and labels, (2) rejection of an individual whose label contains any cue not present in the template (foreign label rejection), or (3) acceptance of an individual whose label contains any cue present in the template (habituated label acceptance).
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