Department of Environmental Zoology, Institute of Animal Science, University of Agriculture in Krakow, al. Mickiewicza 24/28, 30-059, Kraków, Poland.
Institute of Botany, Faculty of Biology and Earth Sciences, Jagiellonian University, Kopernika 27, 31-501, Kraków, Poland.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2019 Jun;26(17):17858-17864. doi: 10.1007/s11356-019-04811-0. Epub 2019 May 7.
The phenotypic diversity of ant workers plays a fundamental role in their biology. In this study, we asked if the body size variation of monomorphic workers of the ant Lasius niger (Formicidae) responds adaptively to metal pollution in a post-mining metal-polluted area. Nest samples of workers were collected along a pollution gradient to calculate the within-colony variance in body size (expressed as maximum head width, HW). The results showed that the body size variation of L. niger was unrelated to the pollution index but demonstrated considerable variation between colonies even within the same study site. We suggest that the differences in morphological diversity between the colonies of L. niger could be shaped by colony personality traits, i.e., by colony-specific foraging and/or the feeding efficiency of nursing workers. The study supports previous findings, showing that morphological traits in Lasius ants are weakly related to environmental metal pollution.
工蚁表型的多样性在蚂蚁生物学中起着基础作用。在这项研究中，我们想知道在一个矿区后的金属污染地区，黑褐林蚁（Formicidae）单态工蚁的体型变化是否能适应金属污染。我们沿着污染梯度采集了工蚁的巢样，以计算体躯大小的巢内方差（用最大头宽（HW）表示）。结果表明，黑褐林蚁的体型变化与污染指数无关，但即使在同一研究地点，不同蚁群之间的体型变化也有很大差异。我们认为，黑褐林蚁蚁群之间形态多样性的差异可能是由蚁群个性特征（即特定的觅食行为和/或保育工蚁的喂养效率）塑造的。这项研究支持了之前的发现，表明在 Lasius 蚂蚁中，形态特征与环境金属污染的关系较弱。
