Camargo Roberto da Silva, Puccini Carolina, Forti Luiz Carlos, de Matos Carlos Alberto Oliveira
Laboratório de Insetos Sociais-Praga, Departamento de Produção Vegetal, Faculdade de Ciências Agronômicas, UNESP, Caixa Postal 237, Botucatu, SP 18603-970, Brasil.
Campus Experimental de Itapeva, UNESP, Itapeva, SP18409-010, Brazil.
Insects. 2017 Jun 9;8(2):59. doi: 10.3390/insects8020059.
The aim of this study was to determine whether worker self-grooming, allogrooming, and direct contact promotes the dispersal of substances among members of the colony. For this purpose, a tracer (Sudan III dye) was applied topically to a worker ant and the social interactions between the worker with the tracer and workers without the tracer were studied. Additionally, the worker heads were dissected to visualize whether or not the post-pharyngeal gland was stained. The post-pharyngeal glands from 50% to 70% of workers were stained depending on the size of the group. With the increase in the experimental group size, the frequency of interactions between workers increased, with touching being the most frequent behavior. The tracer dye was probably passed on by direct contact between workers, followed by self-grooming and allogrooming. These behaviors are responsible for the rapid dispersal of substances among colony members as observed in our experiment. The results therefore support the hypothesis that contact with substances promotes the contamination of nestmates, even in the absence of feeding, serving as a model for further studies on the contamination of workers with the active ingredients of insecticides.
本研究的目的是确定工蚁的自我梳理、相互梳理以及直接接触是否会促进物质在蚁群成员之间的传播。为此，将一种示踪剂（苏丹III染料）局部涂抹在一只工蚁身上，并研究了带有示踪剂的工蚁与不带示踪剂的工蚁之间的社会互动。此外，解剖工蚁头部以观察咽后腺是否被染色。根据群体大小，50%至70%的工蚁的咽后腺被染色。随着实验组规模的增加，工蚁之间的互动频率增加，其中接触是最频繁的行为。示踪染料可能是通过工蚁之间的直接接触传播的，其次是自我梳理和相互梳理。正如我们在实验中所观察到的，这些行为导致了物质在蚁群成员之间的快速传播。因此，这些结果支持了这样一种假设，即与物质的接触会促进巢友之间的污染，即使在没有进食的情况下也是如此，这为进一步研究杀虫剂活性成分对工蚁的污染提供了一个模型。
