Grześ Irena M, Okrutniak Mateusz, Sternalski Jakub, Banasiak Marek, Piszczek Piotr
Department of Environmental Zoology, Institute of Animal Sciences, Agricultural University, Al. Mickiewicza 24/28, PL-30-059 Kraków, Poland (
Institute of Botany, Faculty of Biology and Earth Sciences, Jagiellonian University, Kopernika 27, 31-501 Kraków, Poland (
Environ Entomol. 2016 Dec;45(6):1574-1578. doi: 10.1093/ee/nvw129. Epub 2016 Sep 17.
Environmental stress can lead to a decrease in the body size of insects. As social insects, ants have a complex caste system; each caste has its own morphological traits and functions in the colony, hence the effects of stress may manifest differentially among different ant castes. Here we investigated the body size of males of the common garden ant, Lasius niger L., 1758, living in a postmining area polluted mainly by Zn, Cd, and Pb. We examined if individual body size decreases with the pollution gradient. The ants were sampled from 39 wild colonies originating from 17 sites located along the metal pollution gradient; head width was used as the estimator of body size. We failed to show a significant correlation between pollution and male body size, indicating no direct effect of pollution on the body size of males of the investigated ant. However, we found a significant dependence with the colony of origin, which is in line with a previous study performed on this species in unpolluted sites. These results further strengthen a general conclusion that morphological traits in ants, such as body size or fluctuating asymmetry, are relatively invariable and stable across gradients of metal pollution.
环境压力会导致昆虫体型减小。作为社会性昆虫，蚂蚁具有复杂的品级制度；每个品级在蚁群中都有其独特的形态特征和功能，因此压力的影响可能在不同蚂蚁品级间表现出差异。在此，我们研究了生活在一个主要受锌、镉和铅污染的采矿后区域的黑褐蚁（Lasius niger L.，1758）雄蚁的体型。我们检验了个体体型是否随污染梯度而减小。这些蚂蚁取自39个野生蚁群，这些蚁群来自沿着金属污染梯度分布的17个地点；头部宽度被用作体型的估计指标。我们未能发现污染与雄蚁体型之间存在显著相关性，这表明污染对所研究蚂蚁的雄蚁体型没有直接影响。然而，我们发现体型与蚁群来源存在显著相关性，这与之前在未受污染地点对该物种进行的一项研究结果一致。这些结果进一步强化了一个普遍结论，即蚂蚁的形态特征，如体型或左右不对称性波动，在金属污染梯度中相对不变且稳定。
