Authors: Heikki Helanterä Stephen J Martin Francis L W Ratnieks
Publish Date: 2007/08/15
Volume: 62, Issue: 2, Pages: 223-228
Abstract
We studied the effect of prior experience to eggs laid by nestmate and nonnestmate queens on the acceptance of queenlaid eggs by worker wood ants Formica fusca We transferred eggs from a nonnestmate queen into colonies during early spring when their own queen was recommencing egg laying A few weeks later workers from these “experienced” colonies accepted eggs of both familiar 44 acceptance and unfamiliar 40 nonnestmate queens much more than workers from control colonies 2 that had only had previous contact with their own queen’s eggs Thus prior exposure to eggs laid by a nonnestmate queen induces much greater acceptance of all nonnestmate queenlaid eggs Mechanistically we hypothesize that exposure to eggs from several queens may increase acceptance by causing a highly permissive acceptance threshold of nonnestmate queenlaid eggs rather than by widening the template for acceptable queenlaid eggs These novel results show that eggdiscrimination behaviour in F fusca is flexible and that workers respond to the diversity of eggs experienced in their colonyWe thank Sedeer ElShowk and Hannele Luhtasela for help in fieldwork and Lotta Sundström for discussions HH was funded by The Academy of Finland 213821 and SJM by the UK Natural Environment Research Council The experiments comply with the current laws of the country in which they were performed
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