Abstract
Understanding the structure of food competition between conspecifics in their natural settings is paramount to addressing more complex questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation. While much research on ants focuses on aggressive food competition between large and foraging trail-using societies, we lack a thorough understanding of inter-colony competition in socially less derived, solitarily foraging species. To fill this gap, we explored the activity of ten neighbouring colonies of the giant ant Dinoponera quadriceps, monitoring 2513 foraging trips of hundreds of workers and all its inter-individual interactions. We found that, on encountering, workers from different colonies rarely engaged in aggressive fights but instead avoided each other or performed ritualised agonistic bouts. We discovered that during foraging trips, a few workers within each colony repeatedly rubbed their gaster on the substrate, a behaviour not observed in the field before. We propose that workers use this behaviour to mark the foraging area and mark more frequently in its periphery. Only 25% of the individuals specialised in this behaviour, and we hypothesise that the specialisation results from the history of interactions and experience of individual foragers. Our study suggests that workers of contiguous D. quadriceps colonies engage in low-risk conflict, mainly displaying ritualised behaviours. As these small societies mainly rely on tiny, unpredictably scattered, albeit abundant in the environment, arthropod prey, and not on persistent food sources, they do not aggressively defend exclusive foraging territories. On the other hand, colonies rely on large overlapping foraging areas to sustain their survival and growth, most often tolerating foragers from nearby colonies. We discuss whether this type of competitive interaction is expected in all solitary foraging species.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Benoit Jahyny (UNIVASF) for comments; Ítalo Sérgio, Leonardo Pacheco, Larissa Galvão, Willian Wollace, and Anderson Souza for fieldwork assistance; and UFRN Herbarium for help with taxonomic identification of ant prey, and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments.
Funding
N. C. and M. E. L. V. received funding grants from the Brazilian Science Ministry (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, CNPq), MCTI/CNPq/Universal 14/2014, PQ 458736/2014, PQ 311790/2021–8. This research was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, CAPES (Programa de Pós-Graduação em Psicologia Experimental [PROEX] 2016/1964 and Programa de Pós-Graduação em Psicobiologia [PROEX] 2019–01 Finance Code 001).
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Maria Eduarda de Lima Vieira: conceptualisation, methodology, validation, investigation, writing — original draft, writing — review and editing; Serafino Teseo: formal analysis, visualisation, writing — original draft, writing — review and editing; Dina Lillia Oliveira de Azevedo: conceptualisation, methodology, writing — original draft; Nicolas Châline: writing — original draft, writing — review and editing; Arrilton Araújo: conceptualisation, writing — original draft, resources, supervision.
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The study was submitted to Sistema de Autorização e Informação em Biodiversidade (SISBIO) of Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio) and approved by permission no. 63908. Because our experimental animal is an invertebrate, according to the law Arouca, no. 11.794/2008, there was no need for submission to the Comissão de Ética no Uso de Animais (CEUA/UFRN). We also consider the recommendations made in the Guidelines for the Use of Animals (Animal Behaviour Society 2021).
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114_2024_1891_MOESM1_ESM.xlsx
Supplementary file1 Table S1. Food items collected by D. quadriceps foragers and Table S2. Average and standard deviation of abiotic and biotic environmental factors over the months of the study. (XLSX 136 KB)
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Supplementary file2 Fig. S1.Pitfall trap design consisting of five plastic cups filled with 10:1 water:tensioactive (detergent) mixture, buried at soil level and connected with plastic barriers. (PNG 528 KB)
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Supplementary file3 Fig. S2. Comparison of overlap areas between the null model (circles) and the observed areas (irregular polygons). (PDF 38 KB)
Supplementary file4 Video S1. A D. quadriceps worker performs a marking bout. (MP4 2653 KB)
Supplementary file5 Video S2. A ritualised agonistic interaction between two D. quadriceps workers. (MOV 34221 KB)
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de Lima Vieira, M.E., Teseo, S., de Azevedo, D.L.O. et al. Competition through ritualized aggressive interactions between sympatric colonies in solitary foraging neotropical ants. Sci Nat 111, 4 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-024-01891-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-024-01891-y