Department of Biological Sciences, Mount Holyoke College, 50 College Street, South Hadley, MA 01075-1462, USA
Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience & Behavior, Mount Holyoke College, 50 College Street, South Hadley, MA 01075-1462, USA
J Exp Biol. 2020 Feb 28;223(Pt 5):jeb212530. doi: 10.1242/jeb.212530.
In colonies of ants, a single queen mates with multiple males, creating the foundation for heritable behavioral specializations. A novel and unique candidate for such specializations is rescue behavior, a precisely delivered form of altruism in which workers attempt to release trapped nestmates and which relies on short-term memory of previous actions to increase its efficiency. Consistent with task specialization, not all individuals participate; instead, some individuals move away from the victim, which gives rescuers unrestricted access. Using a bioassay to identify rescuers and non-rescuers, coupled with paternity assignment via polymorphic microsatellite markers, we not only show that rescue behavior is heritable, with 34% of the variation explained by paternity, but also establish that rescue, heretofore overlooked in analyses of division of labor, is a true specialization, an ant version of first responders. Moreover, this specialization emerges as early as 5 days of age, and the frequency of rescuers remains constant across ants' age ranges. The extremely broad range of these ants' heritable polyethism provides further support for the critical role of polyandry in increasing the efficiency of colony structure and, in turn, reproductive success.
在蚂蚁群体中，一只蚁后会与多只雄蚁交配，为她的可遗传行为专业化奠定基础。救援行为是一种新颖而独特的候选专业化行为，这是一种精确传递的利他主义形式，依赖于对先前行为的短期记忆来提高其效率。与任务专业化一致的是，并非所有个体都参与其中；相反，一些个体从受害者身边移开，这为救援者提供了不受限制的通道。通过生物测定来识别救援者和非救援者，并结合多态性微卫星标记进行亲子关系分配，我们不仅表明救援行为是可遗传的，有 34%的变异可以用亲子关系来解释，而且还确立了救援行为是一种真正的专业化，是蚂蚁版的急救人员。此外，这种专业化早在 5 天龄时就出现了，而且救援者的频率在蚂蚁的年龄范围内保持不变。这些蚂蚁广泛的可遗传多态性进一步支持了多配偶制在提高群体结构效率、进而提高繁殖成功率方面的关键作用。
