Laterality of leaf cutting in the attine ant Acromyrmex echinatior

Jasmin, Jean-Nicolas; Devaux, Céline

doi:10.1007/s00040-014-0379-x

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Conversely, cockroaches (Cooper et al, 2011) and giant water bugs (Kight et al, 2008) show a consistent bias among most individuals within a population (population-level lateralisation). However, the majority of evidence for population-level lateralisation comes from eusocial insects such as leaf cutting ants (Jasmin and Devaux, 2015), bumble bees (Kells and Goulson, 2001) and honeybees (Rogers & Vallortigara, 2019).…”

Section: (D) Implications For Memory Lateralisation In the Insectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lateralization of short- and long-term visual memories in an insect

Fernandes

Niven

2020

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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The formation of memories within the vertebrate brain is lateralized between hemispheres across multiple modalities. However, in invertebrates evidence for lateralization is restricted to olfactory memories, primarily from social bees. Here, we use a classical conditioning paradigm with a visual conditioned stimulus to show that visual memories are lateralized in the wood ant, Formica rufa . We show that a brief contact between a sugar reward and either the right or left antenna (reinforcement) is sufficient to produce a lateralized memory, even though the visual cue is visible to both eyes throughout training and testing. Reinforcement given to the right antenna induced short-term memories, whereas reinforcement given to the left antenna induced long-term memories. Thus, short- and long-term visual memories are lateralized in wood ants. This extends the modalities across which memories are lateralized in insects and suggests that such memory lateralization may have evolved multiple times, possibly linked to the evolution of eusociality in the Hymenoptera.

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Section: (D) Implications For Memory Lateralisation In the Insectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lateralization of short- and long-term visual memories in an insect

Fernandes

Niven

2020

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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“…Yet these results must be taken with caution because they probably resulted from small sample sizes, as shown by a similar study with much larger samples (Hughes, Cauthen, & Driscoll, 2014). As shown by Hughes et al (2014) and more formally by Jasmin and Devaux (2015), because laterality observations for a given individual are sampled from an underlying binomial distribution, deviation from left-right equality can occur by chance alone, even for ambidextrous individuals, and especially when few observations are made for each animal. Simulations of ambidextrous populations thus provide a robust approach to test for lateralization.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…The expected value of L deviates from zero for ambidextrous individuals even when they are observed relatively frequently (Jasmin & Devaux, 2015). For instance, L = 0.19, 0.12 and 0.088 for ambidextrous individuals with, respectively, n = 5, 10 and 20 observations.…”

Section: Sex and Age Effects On Behavioural Lateralizationmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…We then calculated the mean L for each of 10 000 simulated such populations and used these population means to obtain 95% confidence intervals for an ambidextrous population with the same sample size as the observed population. Matching the observed sampling effort is crucial because L varies with the number of repeated measurements, even for ambidextrous individuals (Jasmin & Devaux, 2015). If the observed L mean was outside the confidence intervals for distributions obtained through simulations, we concluded that the observed individuals were lateralized for that behaviour.…”

Section: Individual Level Lateralization Analysismentioning

confidence: 88%

“…For each individual and behaviour, we calculated an index of laterality intensity, L as L = 1k/n -0.51 where k is the number of right-side behaviours among n individual observations (Jasmin & Devaux, 2015). This index increases statistical power to detect lateralization through pooling together left-and right-lateralized individuals.…”

Section: Individual Level Lateralization Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Lateralization of complex behaviours in wild greater flamingos

et al. 2018

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Lateralization refers to the preferential use of one side of the body to perform certain tasks, often as a consequence of the specialization of cerebral hemispheres. Individuals may benefit from lateralization if it allows them to perform complex tasks simultaneously. Studies on laterality further suggest that sex and age can influence the extent of lateralization. However, most studies on lateralization have been performed on captive individuals, exposed to simplified environments and expressing limited behavioural repertoire. Here, we evaluated behavioural lateralization in the greater flamingo, Phoenicopterus roseus, through observations of wild individuals 5-37 years old. We examined the lateralization of simple behaviours (resting postures) and of several demanding behaviours requiring enhanced motor control and coordination (stamping for food and five courtship postures). Resting postures were not lateralized. In contrast, nearly all flamingos were completely lateralized for stamping, with a significant predominance of right-footed individuals. During courtship displays, twist-preens were significantly lateralized, yet with no dominant laterality at the population level. Finally, we detected a slight positive effect of age on the intensity of twistpreen lateralization, which may be related to the increased complexity of courtship displays with age in this species. Our results support the hypothesis that lateralization manifests in complex behaviours, even in wild animals.

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Large deformation diffeomorphic mapping of 3D shape variation reveals two distinct mandible and head capsule morphs in Atta vollenweideri leaf‐cutter worker ants

Imirzian,

Püffel,

Roces

et al. 2024

Ecology and Evolution

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Ants are crucial ecosystem engineers, and their ecological success is facilitated by a division of labour among sterile “workers”. In some ant lineages, workers have undergone further morphological differentiation, resulting in differences in body size, shape, or both. Distinguishing between changes in size and shape is not trivial. Traditional approaches based on allometry reduce complex 3D shapes into simple linear, areal, or volume metrics; modern approaches using geometric morphometrics typically rely on landmarks, introducing observer bias and a trade‐off between effort and accuracy. Here, we use a landmark‐free method based on large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping (LDDMM) to assess the co‐variation of size and 3D shape in the mandibles and head capsules of Atta vollenweideri leaf‐cutter ants, a species exhibiting extreme worker size‐variation. Body mass varied by more than two orders of magnitude, but a shape atlas created via LDDMM on μ‐CT‐derived 3D mesh files revealed only two distinct head capsule and mandibles shapes—one for the minims (body mass < 1 mg) and one for all other workers. We discuss the functional significance of the identified 3D shape variation, and its implications for the evolution of extreme polymorphism in Atta.

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Laterality of leaf cutting in the attine ant Acromyrmex echinatior

Cited by 6 publications

References 27 publications

Lateralization of short- and long-term visual memories in an insect

Lateralization of short- and long-term visual memories in an insect

Lateralization of complex behaviours in wild greater flamingos

Large deformation diffeomorphic mapping of 3D shape variation reveals two distinct mandible and head capsule morphs in Atta vollenweideri leaf‐cutter worker ants

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