Abstract
Studies on many species have suggested that animals across the taxa remain behaviourally motionless for a significant part of their active phase. It is true of social insects such as ants, which constitute a considerable portion of insect biomass. It is hypothesized that behavioral quiescence ensures the conservation of energy. In many ecologically demanding situations, organisms lose a significant part of their rest. Many animals become more active before and during mating to defend territories, compete with rivals, engage in the nuptial flight and prepare to take care of the brood and raise the first batch of workers. Although we know mating changes activity in ants, there is negligible information on how mating affects the amount of rest. Here, I report that the queens of the carpenter ant Camponotus compressus lose a significant amount of rest immediately after mating, and this change can be seen up to 1-year post-mating. Before mating, males and females are active simultaneously, which may be critical for their nuptial flight. The total rest of the unmated queens is less than males during the day and night. After mating, mated queens lose a significant amount of rest. I was interested in observing whether these changes are transient and are restricted to a small window after mating, so I housed ant queens (unmated and mated) in the lab for a year. After 1 year, mated queens exhibit a lower amount of rest than unmated queens of the same age and freshly mated queens. These results suggest ants forgo their rest to adapt to the new phase of life after mating, which involves immediate searching of nest sites, building nests and raising offspring.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Nisha Sharma, Sukriti Mishra, Vinodh Ilangovan, and Sheetal Potdar for reading the draft. I also thank reviewers (Barrett Klein and other anonymous reviewer) for their suggestions that improved the manuscript.
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I thank SERB/DST for Ramanujan Fellowship (SB/S2/RJN-005/2016) and extramural Grant (EMR/2017/001625).
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Lone, S.R. Rest of the carpenter ant Camponotus compressus undergoes a drastic change after mating. Insect. Soc. 70, 97–103 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-022-00896-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-022-00896-y