Ant larvae regulate worker foraging behavior and ovarian activity in a dose-dependent manner.

Division of labor in insect societies relies on simple behavioral rules, whereby individual colony members respond to dynamic signals indicating the need for certain tasks to be performed. This in turn gives rise to colony-level phenotypes. However, empirical studies quantifying colony-level signal-response dynamics are lacking. Here, we make use of the unusual biology and experimental amenability of the queenless clonal raider ant Cerapachys biroi, to jointly quantify the behavioral and physiological responses of workers to a social signal emitted by larvae. Using automated behavioral quantification and oocyte size measurements in colonies of different sizes and with different worker to larvae ratios, we show that the workers in a colony respond to larvae by increasing foraging activity and inhibiting ovarian activation in a progressive manner, and that these responses are stronger in smaller colonies. This work adds to our knowledge of the processes that link plastic individual behavioral/physiological responses to colony-level phenotypes in social insect colonies.

昆虫社会的劳动分工依赖于简单的行为规则，即单个群体成员对表明需要执行某些任务的动态信号做出反应。这反过来又产生了群体层面的表型。然而，缺乏对群体层面信号 - 反应动态进行量化的实证研究。在这里，我们利用无后克隆劫掠蚁（Cerapachys biroi）独特的生物学特性和实验适应性，共同量化工蚁对幼虫发出的社会信号的行为和生理反应。通过对不同规模以及工蚁与幼虫比例不同的蚁群进行自动化行为量化和卵母细胞大小测量，我们表明蚁群中的工蚁通过逐步增加觅食活动和抑制卵巢激活来对幼虫做出反应，并且这些反应在较小的蚁群中更为强烈。这项工作增加了我们对将社会性昆虫群体中个体的可塑性行为/生理反应与群体层面表型联系起来的过程的了解。