The paper of the day, made me curious, because it is about theft in ant colonies and in the abstract you find a hint, that you could learn something about general “tricks” used by successful thieves… in ants and in humans. Thievery is quite common in the animal kingdom. The most common stolen “items” are food, nesting sites, nesting material and sometimes even the brood itself. The brood of somebody else can be used in different ways: you can eat them, adopt them or take them as slaves. All three strategies can be observed e.g. in different ant species. Army ants with their mass raids, tend to eat 75% of the brood of the victim colonies. Slave-making, can be observed in different ant species and most of them it is obligatory: The colony cannot survive without slaves. In their paper, Bishwarup Paul and Sumana Annagiri, checked under which conditions the risk for brood thievery increases, what tricks are used by the thieves and how they can be stopped. The ant of interest in this study was the primitively eusocial ponerine ant Diacamma indicum that inhabits the tropics. Interestingly, this ant species lacks a queen caste. A single mated worker maintains the reproductive monopoly. In the study, two ant colonies, are placed in the opposite corners of a rectangular box. Then both nests are disturbed and only one alternative nest is placed in the middle. As both colonies had to look for a new nest, this setup increased the inter-colony interaction, as both colonies have to look for a new nest. As just one of them can actually move, all experiments end with one colony moving and building up their new nest in the middle of the arena, while the other has to stay in their destroyed nest. Color dots on the single ants and cameras observe while this process: who steals what, when and with which strategy and how and if the thieves are blocked by guards. The results of the study show that thievery in ants is not so different from thievery in humans: (I) Nest damage increases the colonies’ vulnerability to brood theft. The ants suddenly have to look for a new home, a perturbed and cannot guard their entrance as usually. If your family house suddenly has broken windows and doors, you also have other problems and a thief can sneak in more easily. (II) Thieves were successful when they acted quickly, and hidden (defensive) and just stole unguarded brood. I guess that are the same rules as for human thieves.
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IdeaI love to increase my general science knowledge by reading papers from different fields of science. Here I share some of them. Archiv
März 2018
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