Leaders follow leaders to reunite the colony: relocation dynamics of an Indian queenless ant in its natural habitat
Highlights
► Exploration of relocation dynamics in the natural habitat of ants. ► Ant colonies experience fission but reunite to a final site during relocation. ► No directional preference for final site and no special attention to gamergate. ► Evacuation phase shorter than reunification phase signifying adaptive response. ► Tandem leaders follow other leaders to achieve colony reunification.
Section snippets
Methods
Eighteen colonies of D. indicum were identified in Mohanpur (Nadia district, West Bengal, India, 22°56′N, 88°31′E) between March 2010 and December 2011. We conducted two experiments with these colonies in their natural habitat. In the first experiment, referred to as the dislodging experiment, colonies were made to relocate from their original nests. In the second experiment, referred to as the displacement experiment, colonies were made to relocate from nestboxes placed in a location different
Relocation Mechanism
In both the dislodging and displacement experiments, most (14/18) of the colonies initially experienced colony fission and later reunified at a final site. Figure 1 illustrates this process for colony DI-47. In this representative case, colony members moved into three temporary sites within 20 min and 96.3% of the colony members reunited at the final site in 142 min. Tandem runs occurred not only between the release site and the temporary sites, and then to the final site, but also between the
Discussion
Previous studies have recognized that emigration is a relatively frequent event in the life of many social insects and has significant implications for their survival and reproduction. However, this phenomenon has received little attention in the context of ants, and we do not know of any studies focusing on relocation in natural habitats at the scale of individual colony members. In the current study, we examined the mechanism by which D. indicum, a ponerine ant, relocated in its natural
Acknowledgments
Behavioural observations were carried out by R.K., A.K. and S.A. Data analyses were carried out by R.K. The project was initiated and supervised by S.A. We are grateful to Swetashree Kolay, Pratik Kumar, Sourav Sen and Manabi Paul for their help in the field. We thank the referees for their comments, which helped improve the manuscript. We also acknowledge Professor R. Gadagkar for useful discussion and Anindita Bhadra for her comments on the manuscript. R.K. was funded by the Council of
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