Chemical communication during foraging in the harvesting ants Messor pergandei and Messor andrei

Plowes, Nicola J. R.; Colella, Tom; Johnson, Robert A.; Hölldobler, Bert

doi:10.1007/s00359-013-0868-9

Cited by 17 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…The identified compounds include propanone (Attygalle et al 1983) and 2-methyl and 3-methlybutanoic acid (Wood et al 2002), which have been found in Dufour glands as well as in mandibular glands (Cammaerts et al 1981;Wood et al 2011). These glands have also been found to contain 3-methyl-1-butanol, butanoic acid (Wood et al 2002) and phenylethanol (Wood et al 2011), the latter having also been found in poison glands, along with 2, 5-dimethylpyrazine; phenylethanol is involved in recruitment ant trail laying (Attygalle and Morgan 1984;Liu and Liu 2002;Plowes et al 2014). Benzaldehyde has been found in pygidial glands (Hölldobler et al 2013).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bacteria may enhance species association in an ant–aphid mutualistic relationship

et al. 2015

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The mutualistic relationships between certain ant and aphid species are well known, the primary benefits being protection for the aphids and carbohydrate-rich honeydew for the ants. Questions remain, however, as to the exact semiochemical factors that establish and maintain such relationships. In this study, we used a series of treatments and associated controls placed at the end of a two-way olfactometer to determine the degree of attractiveness of a complete plant-aphid-honeydew system as well as individual components of that system. Both the olfactometer branch selected by the black garden ant (Lasius niger) and the linear speed with which ants moved through the device were measured. Study results showed that ants were attracted not just to the complete plant system and the honeydew itself, but also to the microbial flora in the absence of plant or honeydew, and specifically to a bacterium from the black bean aphid (Aphis fabae) honeydew, Staphylococcus xylosus. This bacterium produces a blend of semiochemicals that attract the ant scouts. This information suggests the presence of a naturally occurring, reliable biotic cue for detection of potential aphid partners. This would have to be confirmed in natural conditions by further field experiments. Rather than being opportunistic species that coincidentally colonize a sugarrich environment, microorganisms living in aphid honeydew may be able to alter emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), thus significantly mediating partner attraction. A bacterial involvement in this mutualistic relationship could alter the manner in which these and similar relationships are viewed and evaluated. Future studies into mutualism stability and function among macroscopic partners will likely need for transition from a two-partner perspective to a multiple-partner perspective, and consider the microbial component, with the potential for one or more taxa making significant contributions to the relationship.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bacteria may enhance species association in an ant–aphid mutualistic relationship

et al. 2015

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“…Foragers leave the nest in a pheromone-marked column which extends several meters (ranging from 3 to 40 m) and then ends. Past the end of the column (referred to as the column head), the ants spread out to forage individually in a foraging fan (Plowes et al 2013(Plowes et al , 2014. Once a piece of food is collected, fan foragers use path integration to return to the column head and as foragers re-enter the pheromone column they change their heading direction toward the nest entrance, following the column to the nest (Plowes et al 2019).…”

Section: Electronic Supplementary Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pheromone cue triggers switch between vectors in the desert harvest ant, Veromessor pergandei

2020

Self Cite

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The desert harvester ant (Veromessor pergandei) employs a mixture of social and individual navigational strategies at separate stages of their foraging trip. Individuals leave the nest along a pheromone-based column, travelling 3-40 m before spreading out to forage individually in a fan. Foragers use path integration while in this fan, accumulating a direction and distance estimate (vector) to return to the end of the column (column head), yet foragers' potential use of path integration in the pheromone-based column is less understood. Here we show foragers rely on path integration both in the foraging fan and while in the column to return to the nest, using separate vectors depending on their current foraging stage in the fan or column. Returning foragers displaced while in the fan oriented and travelled to the column head location while those displaced after reaching the column travel in the nest direction, signifying the maintenance of a two-vector system with separate fan and column vectors directing a forager to two separate spatial locations. Interestingly, the trail pheromone and not the surrounding terrestrial cues mediate use of these distinct vectors, as fan foragers briefly exposed to the pheromone cues of the column in isolation altered their paths to a combination of the fan and column vectors. The pheromone acts as a contextual cue triggering both the retrieval of the column-vector memory and its integration with the forager's current fan-vector.

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“…Similarly, the process of navigation in a spatially-distributed sensory landscape is highly complex to infer. Despite being robust and conserved, the responses to gradients of attractive or aversive chemical [20], updraft [21,22] or visual [23,24] gradients are subtle. The moment at which the animal experiences and reacts to the cue will vary from one animal to the other and is difficult to infer.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A lexical approach for identifying behavioral action sequences

Reddy¹,

Desban

Tanaka

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Animals display characteristic behavioral patterns when performing a task, such as the spiraling of a soaring bird or the surge-and-cast of a male moth searching for a female. Identifying such conserved patterns occurring rarely in noisy behavioral data is key to understanding the behavioral response to a distributed stimulus in unrestrained animals. Existing models seek to describe the dynamics of behavior or segment individual locomotor episodes rather than to identify occasional, transient irregularities that make up the behavioral response. To fill this gap, we develop a lexical, hierarchical model of behavior. We designed an unsupervised algorithm called “BASS” to efficiently identify and segment conserved behavioral action sequences transiently occurring in long behavioral recordings. When applied to navigating larval zebrafish, BASS extracts a dictionary of remarkably long, non-Markovian sequences consisting of repeats and mixtures of slow forward and turn bouts. Applied to a novel chemotaxis assay, BASS uncovers conserved chemotactic strategies deployed by zebrafish to avoid aversive cues consisting of sequences of fast large-angle turns and burst swims. In a simulated dataset of soaring gliders climbing thermals, BASS finds the spiralling patterns characteristic of soaring behavior. In both cases, BASS succeeds in identifying action sequences that are highly conserved but transient in the behavior deployed by freely moving animals. BASS can be easily incorporated into the pipelines of existing behavioral analyses across diverse species, and even more broadly used as a generic algorithm for pattern recognition in low-dimensional sequential data.

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Chemical communication during foraging in the harvesting ants Messor pergandei and Messor andrei

Cited by 17 publications

References 26 publications

Bacteria may enhance species association in an ant–aphid mutualistic relationship

Bacteria may enhance species association in an ant–aphid mutualistic relationship

Pheromone cue triggers switch between vectors in the desert harvest ant, Veromessor pergandei

A lexical approach for identifying behavioral action sequences

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