Specialist and Hyperspecialist Workers of Leaf-cutting Ants during Nest Digging
Journal Title: International Journal of Agriculture Innovations and Research - Year 2018, Vol 6, Issue 6
Abstract
As Specialists are workers that repeatedly perform a certain taskand so have a high frequency of acts in this activity when compared to all workers at the colony. Within these workers, there are some others who will perform the task in a frequency even higher and were more recently denominated as hyperspecialists. Using soil pellets transport activity as a model, the present study investigated whether the level of activity of Acromyrmex subterraneus Hymenoptera: Formicidae) workers in a certain task differs as a function of other available tasks (brood and symbiotic fungus transport). The hypothesis was that a larger number of available tasks promotes changes in the proportion of specialist and/or hyperspecialist workers engaged in a certain task. With this purpose, we evaluated the soil pellets transport activity of individual workers exposed to conditions where there was just the soil to dig, soil with brood and fungus, soil only with fungus andsoil only with brood. The individual frequency of activity (transport of a soil pellet) was recorded for 16 mini-colonies submitted to the different treatments during 24 hours and 10 minutes of each recording hour were sampled. Data indicate that the distribution of soil pellets transport activity across workers was skewed for all tested conditions, with a large number of workers being inactive, while few workers repeatedly perform the task of soil pellets transport. The percentage of inactive, non-specialists, specialists or hyperspecialist workers did not differ between treatments, indicating that specialist and hyperspecialist workers exist during soil pellets transport and they represent a fixed worker force to this task. We conclude that there is specialization for the soil pellets transport with specialist and hyperspecialist worker proportion maintenance even when a larger number of tasks is available.
Authors and Affiliations
Carlos Magno dos Santos, et al.
Keywords
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