Pereira Hugo, Detrain Claire
Unit of Social Ecology, Université Libre de Bruxelles, CP 231, Boulevard du Triomphe, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.
R Soc Open Sci. 2020 Feb 19;7(2):191705. doi: 10.1098/rsos.191705. eCollection 2020 Feb.
Insect societies have developed sanitary strategies, one of which is the avoidance of infectious food resources as a primary line of defence. Using binary choices, we investigated whether ants can identify prey that has been artificially infected with the entomopathogenic fungus, . We compared the ants' foraging behaviour towards infected prey at three different stages of fungus development (i) prey covered with fungal conidia, (ii) prey freshly killed by the fungus and (iii) sporulating prey. Most foragers retrieved a corpse covered with a high number of spores but they consistently avoided a sporulating prey and collected less prey that had recently died from fungal infection. Furthermore, ant responses were highly variable, with some individuals retrieving the first prey they encountered while others inspected both available prey before making a decision. Workers were not repelled by the simple presence of fungal conidia but nevertheless, they avoided retrieving cadavers at later stages of fungal infection. We discuss how these different avoidance responses could be related to: differences in the ants' perceptive abilities; physico-chemical cues characterizing fungus-infected prey or in the existence of physiological or behavioural defences that limit sanitary risks associated with potentially contaminated resources.
昆虫社会已经发展出了卫生策略，其中之一就是将避免接触受感染的食物资源作为首要防线。我们通过二元选择实验，研究了蚂蚁是否能够识别被昆虫病原真菌人工感染的猎物。我们比较了蚂蚁在真菌发育的三个不同阶段对受感染猎物的觅食行为：（i）覆盖有真菌分生孢子的猎物，（ii）刚被真菌杀死的猎物，以及（iii）正在产孢的猎物。大多数觅食者取回了覆盖着大量孢子的尸体，但它们始终避开正在产孢的猎物，并且收集的近期因真菌感染而死亡的猎物较少。此外，蚂蚁的反应高度可变，一些个体取回它们遇到的第一个猎物，而另一些则在做出决定之前检查两个可供选择的猎物。工蚁不会仅仅因为真菌分生孢子的存在而被排斥，然而，它们会避免在真菌感染的后期取回尸体。我们讨论了这些不同的回避反应如何可能与以下因素相关：蚂蚁感知能力的差异；表征受真菌感染猎物的物理化学线索，或者是否存在限制与潜在受污染资源相关的卫生风险的生理或行为防御机制。
