Department of Biology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Department of Ecoscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Pest Manag Sci. 2024 Jul;80(7):3445-3450. doi: 10.1002/ps.8049. Epub 2024 Mar 9.
Wood ants are promising biocontrol agents in fruit plantations because they prey on pest insects and inhibit plant diseases. However, these ants also attend plant-feeding homopterans to harvest their honeydew secretions, thereby increasing their numbers. This problem can be solved by offering ants alternative sugar sources that are more attractive than honeydew. From natural interactions, it is known that some species manipulate mutualistic partners toward loyalty by adding alkaloids to the food they offer their mutualists. Inspired by this, the addition of alkaloids might be used to make ants loyal to artificial sugar feeders and thus used to reduce populations of ant-farmed homopterans in ant-mediated biological control. We aimed to explore whether wood ants (Formica polyctena) would develop a taste preference for morphine-containing sugar solutions in two-choice laboratory tests.
After having fed on a morphine/sugar solution for 1 week, ants showed a significant preference for morphine solutions compared with equal concentration sugar solutions without morphine. Furthermore, ants lost this preference after 6-9 days on a morphine-free diet.
The results show that wood ants react to morphine in their food, enabling chemical manipulation of their behavior, most likely through a taste preference. Thus, ants are susceptible to manipulation by mutualistic partners in natural interactions and furthermore may be manipulated artificially in biocontrol programs to avoid ant-mediated build-up of homopteran populations. © 2024 The Authors. Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.
在水果种植园中，木蚁是很有前途的生物防治剂，因为它们以害虫为食并抑制植物病害。然而，这些蚂蚁也会取食以植物为食的同翅目昆虫，以获取它们的蜜露分泌物，从而增加其数量。这个问题可以通过提供比蜜露更有吸引力的替代糖源来解决。从自然相互作用中可知，某些物种通过向其共生伙伴提供的食物中添加生物碱，从而操纵共生伙伴对其保持忠诚。受此启发，添加生物碱可能被用于使蚂蚁对人工糖食者保持忠诚，从而减少蚁农同翅目昆虫在蚁介导的生物防治中的数量。我们旨在探索木蚁（Formica polyctena）是否会在双选择实验室测试中对含有吗啡的糖溶液产生味觉偏好。
在吸食吗啡/糖溶液 1 周后，与不含吗啡的等浓度糖溶液相比，蚂蚁对吗啡溶液表现出明显的偏好。此外，蚂蚁在没有吗啡的饮食中 6-9 天后失去了这种偏好。
结果表明，木蚁对食物中的吗啡有反应，使它们的行为能够通过化学操纵，很可能是通过味觉偏好来实现。因此，蚂蚁很容易受到自然相互作用中共生伙伴的操纵，并且可以在生物防治计划中被人为操纵，以避免蚁介导的同翅目昆虫种群的增加。 © 2024 作者。Pest Management Science 由 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 代表化学工业协会出版。
