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Marching with Ants to a New Nest: Colony Composition and Relocation Dynamics of Diacamma indicum

  • Review Article
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Journal of the Indian Institute of Science Aims and scope

Abstract

In this review, we journey with Diacamma indicum a Ponerine ant over the past decade as they relocate to new nests and discover the challenges they face along the way and how they solve them. Colony relocation is a goal-oriented dynamic task that involves all the colony members and impacts the colonies’ fitness. After explaining how I [SA] initiated this journey, we examine colony composition of this species by analysing data from 1200 colonies collected over the past 13 years. On average colonies contain 89.35 (Standard Deviation = 38.79) adult females, 0.29 (SD = 1.19) males and 56.6 (SD = 42.53) brood items of different development stages and these were significantly impacted by seasonality such that pre-monsoon colonies had the highest numbers. After explaining how colonies are collected and maintained in the lab, we explore the architecture of the subterrain nests in the natural habitat. Colonies live in relatively simple single-chambered nests that do not change significantly across seasons and consist of an entrance tunnel and a secondary runoff tunnel. All members of the colony are recruited to the new nest site by tandem running and this species shows the highest documented tandem running speeds at 4.35 body lengths per second and a path efficiency of 83.95% with only 2.4% of tandem runs being unsuccessful in the natural habitat. Even in lab conditions, when colonies are given defined paths of different lengths, colonies showed significant preference to travel through short paths, highlighting their ability to optimize their path even in the absence of chemical trails. A combination of experiments in the natural habitat and controlled experiments in the lab which are anchored in the umwelt of the organism has enabled us to understand how D. indicum functions and has revealed the selective forces that are operating on the organization and performances of relocation. Our journey has brought to light answers to several questions but has also opened up several more avenues for exploration, branching out in different directions. With time and dedicated minds, we hope to continue on this route to marvel at and unravel the achievements of these superorganisms.

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Data availability

Data presented in this review will be shared upon reasonable request.

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Funding

We thank Purbayan Ghosh for entering information from the incoming colony register into excel sheets. We thank Basudev Ghosh for his help in maintaining colonies in the lab and collecting them. We thank Subhashis Halder and Kushankur Bhattacharyya for their excellent photographs. We thank Sudhi Rao for constant supply of Testors paints and feather forceps. We thank Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata for the support they have given and SERB for the two Grants SR/FT/LS-179/2009 and EMR/2017/00147 over the years. We also thank University grants Commission, INSPIRE and CSIR for giving fellowship to the Ph.D. students who have worked in the lab over the years. We also thank two anonymous reviewers and the Editor for their suggestions which has helped us improve our manuscript.

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  1. Behaviour and Ecology Lab, Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, Mohanpur, West Bengal, 741246, India

    Sumana Annagiri & Eshika Halder

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  1. Sumana Annagiri
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Correspondence to Sumana Annagiri.

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On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest. We have conducted all our experiments in accordance with the guidelines that are applicable to working with the model organism in our country. We have collected colonies from areas close to human habitation that are not part of any protected areas or forests. Colonies were maintained in the laboratory with ad libitum food and water and after the experiment, they were released back in the habitat from which they were collected.

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Annagiri, S., Halder, E. Marching with Ants to a New Nest: Colony Composition and Relocation Dynamics of Diacamma indicum. J Indian Inst Sci 103, 1115–1128 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41745-023-00373-w

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