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Chemical basis of nestmate recognition in a defense context in a one-piece nesting termite

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Abstract

Nestmate recognition is a necessary capacity for the occurrence of discrimination between nestmate and non-nestmate individuals. In one-piece nesting termites, which nest and forage in a single piece of wood, nestmate recognition is poorly studied mainly because the probability of encountering exogenous individuals is low in comparison with separate-piece nesting termites. Previous work described that production of soldiers of Neotermes chilensis, a one-piece nesting termite, increased when the risk of invasion of their colony increased, for example when neighboring colonies were present in the same nesting substrate and members of different colonies met when digging galleries. If soldiers are to fulfill their defensive role under these circumstances, they should show nestmate recognition ability; moreover, based on work on other social insects, such nestmate recognition should be based on cuticular compounds (CC). Bioassays were performed in which a soldier of N. chilensis was confronted with a nestmate or non-nestmate primary reproductive, pseudergate or another soldier, and in which a soldier was confronted with untreated and with CC-deprived dead primary reproductives. The results showed that soldiers were indeed more aggressive toward non-nestmates than nestmates for all castes, and that this discrimination was mediated mainly by qualitative (simple matching coefficient) and quantitative (Renkonen index) differences in CC.

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Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by FONDECYT grant 1120210 to HMN, CONICYT grant 79100013 to LF-P, and CONICYT fellowship for PhD studies D- 21080582 and MECESUP internship program to DA-O. The able technical assistance of Ms. Carolina Mendoza and the help of Mr. Christopher Delgado in the analysis of chromatograms are gratefully acknowledged. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms and suggestions on the original manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ciencias Ecológicas, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Casilla 653, Santiago, Chile

    Daniel Aguilera-Olivares, Camila Burgos-Lefimil, Wara Melendez & Hermann M. Niemeyer

  2. Instituto de Entomología, Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación, 7760197, Santiago, Chile

    Luis Flores-Prado

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  1. Daniel Aguilera-Olivares
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  2. Camila Burgos-Lefimil
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  3. Wara Melendez
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  5. Hermann M. Niemeyer
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Correspondence to Daniel Aguilera-Olivares or Hermann M. Niemeyer.

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Handling Editor: Thomas Schmitt.

Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 5.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Mass spectra for unidentified cuticular compounds from individuals of N. chilensis, as shown in Table 2. Retention indexes were: a 1919, b 2117, c 2517 and d 2614

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Aguilera-Olivares, D., Burgos-Lefimil, C., Melendez, W. et al. Chemical basis of nestmate recognition in a defense context in a one-piece nesting termite. Chemoecology 26, 163–172 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00049-016-0217-x

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