TY - JOUR
T1 - RESEARCH ARTICLE Temnothorax rugatulus ant colonies consistently vary in nest structure across time and context
AU - DiRienzo, Nicholas
AU - Dornhaus, Anna
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding was provided by a University of Arizona Postdoctoral Excellence in Research and Teaching Fellowship (National Institute of Health # 5K12GM000708-17) awarded to ND.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 DiRienzo, Dornhaus. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2017/6
Y1 - 2017/6
N2 - A host of animals build architectural constructions. Such constructions frequently vary with environmental and individual/colony conditions, and their architecture directly influences behavior and fitness. The nests of ant colonies drive and enable many of their collective behaviors, and as such are part of their ‘extended phenotype’. Since ant colonies have been recently shown to differ in behavior and life history strategy, we ask whether colonies differ in another trait: the architecture of the constructions they create. We allowed Temnothorax rugatulus rock ants, who create nests by building walls within narrow rock gaps, to repeatedly build nest walls in a fixed crevice but under two environmental conditions. We find that colonies consistently differ in their architecture across environments and over nest building events. Colony identity explained 12–40% of the variation in nest architecture, while colony properties and environmental conditions explained 5–20%, as indicated by the condition and marginal R2 values. When their nest boxes were covered, which produced higher humidity and lower airflow, colonies built thicker, longer, and heavier walls. Colonies also built more robust walls when they had more brood, suggesting a protective function of wall thickness. This is, to our knowledge, the first study to explicitly investigate the repeatability of nestbuilding behavior in a controlled environment. Our results suggest that colonies may face tradeoffs, perhaps between factors such as active vs. passive nest defense, and that selection may act on individual construction rules as a mechanisms to mediate colony-level behavior.
AB - A host of animals build architectural constructions. Such constructions frequently vary with environmental and individual/colony conditions, and their architecture directly influences behavior and fitness. The nests of ant colonies drive and enable many of their collective behaviors, and as such are part of their ‘extended phenotype’. Since ant colonies have been recently shown to differ in behavior and life history strategy, we ask whether colonies differ in another trait: the architecture of the constructions they create. We allowed Temnothorax rugatulus rock ants, who create nests by building walls within narrow rock gaps, to repeatedly build nest walls in a fixed crevice but under two environmental conditions. We find that colonies consistently differ in their architecture across environments and over nest building events. Colony identity explained 12–40% of the variation in nest architecture, while colony properties and environmental conditions explained 5–20%, as indicated by the condition and marginal R2 values. When their nest boxes were covered, which produced higher humidity and lower airflow, colonies built thicker, longer, and heavier walls. Colonies also built more robust walls when they had more brood, suggesting a protective function of wall thickness. This is, to our knowledge, the first study to explicitly investigate the repeatability of nestbuilding behavior in a controlled environment. Our results suggest that colonies may face tradeoffs, perhaps between factors such as active vs. passive nest defense, and that selection may act on individual construction rules as a mechanisms to mediate colony-level behavior.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85021062567&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85021062567&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0177598
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0177598
M3 - Article
C2 - 28636616
AN - SCOPUS:85021062567
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 12
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 6
M1 - e0177598
ER -