analis only a handful of individuals (the scouts) hold all the valuable information about foraging sites. However, individual decision-making can also play an important role, depending on the type of foraging behaviour. Collective decision-making is one of the main mechanisms in social insects through which foraging is regulated. Lack of treatment increased mortality from 10% to 80% within 24 hours, with the cause of death most likely being infections. I further observed treatment of the injury by nestmates inside the nest through intense allogrooming directly at the wound. Interestingly, this was regulated not by the helper but by the uncooperativeness of the injured ant. Heavily injured ants that lost too many legs during the fight on the other hand are not helped.
#ANTS DIG DUG ARRANGEMENT DRIVERS#
A model accounting for this rescue behaviour identifies the drivers favouring its evolution and estimates that rescuing allows for maintaining a 29% larger colony size. These injured ants “call for help” with pheromones present in their mandibular gland reservoirs. analis, consisting of injured nestmates being carried back to the nest, reduces combat mortality. I show that a unique rescue behaviour in M. analis incurs high injury/mortality risks when preying on termites, some risk mitigating adaptations have evolved. a caste specialized in fighting predators. The evolutionary arms race between termites and ants led to various defensive mechanisms in termites, e.g. Predators of highly defensive prey likely develop cost reducing adaptations. These ants then follow the scout in a column formation to the termites and after the hunt return together to the nest, these raids occur two to five times per day. Their foraging behaviour is regulated by a handful of individual scouts (10-20) that search for termite foraging sites before returning to the nest to recruit a large number of nestmates (200-500 ants).
This ponerine ant species is specialized on hunting only termites of the subfamily Macrotermitinae at their foraging sites. I therefore decided to investigate the behaviour of Megaponera analis. Specialization often leads to unique adaptations in morphology and behaviour. The theory of optimal foraging tries to predict foraging behaviour through the overarching question: how animals should forage so as to minimize costs while maximizing profits? Social insects, having occupied nearly every natural niche through widely different strategies, offer themselves as an ideal group to study how well optimal foraging theory can explain their behaviour and success. Moreover, we hope to encourage and facilitate researchers in behavioral ecology and other subdisciplines to further experimentally analyze rescue behavior, not only in ants but also in other taxa.Īn efficient foraging strategy is one of the most important traits for the fitness of animals. We hope to help navigate among studies on rescue behavior and provide the most up-to-date summary of the relevant literature. We additionally point out some gaps in knowledge that become evident when research devoted to rescue behavior in rats, the second most studied group of animals in this context, is briefly overviewed. We highlight the progress in research on rescue behavior in ants, indicate that this behavior is probably much more common than previously thought yet thus far demonstrated in only a few species, and uncover research gaps and open questions that remain unexplored. We review studies devoted to the subject and group them into four main areas of research on ant rescue actions: (1) variation in rescue behavior activity on a between-individual scale, (2) factors contributing to the evolution of rescue behavior on a between-species scale, (3) rescue behavior releaser signals and (4) rescue behavior benefits and costs. The highest numbers of published empirical works have been devoted to rescue behavior in ants and they have enormous potential for further study. The subject of this review, rescue, is a type of altruistic behavior in which the actor puts itself at risk to save another individual, the recipient, that is in danger. This phenomenon, which is generally difficult to understand and explain, requires special research attention. Altruism is defined as an action that decreases the lifetime direct fitness of an actor and benefits one or more recipients.
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