Global environmental change has altered ecological communities through direct losses of biodiversity and through changes to species interactions. Ants are a diverse, widespread, and abundant group with a broad range of interactions with other taxa. Knowledge of how disturbances impact ant interactions is important for understanding the implications of global change for...
Cooperative transport, defined as the coordinated effort of multiple individuals to move a single item, enables social animals to retrieve resources more efficiently and reduces the risk of exploitation by competitors. In this study, we provide the first detailed description of such a coordinated prey retrieval behavior in the invasive ant Anoplolepis gracilipes. We examined the...
Gut microbiomes play a significant role in the health, development, and behavior of numerous species, including honey bees (Apis mellifera). Worker honey bees exhibit varying degrees of hygienic behavior, which involves the removal of unhealthy brood to mitigate disease within their colony. However, the potential relationship between hygienic behavior and the honey bee gut...
Investigating the life history of social insect colonies and the demography of their populations are important for their conservation, but data collection is challenging. There is a growing interest in understanding the population status of wild-living honeybee colonies across Europe, for which it is critical to collect data on survival and natality rates. Although survival rates...
Facultatively social insects are crucial for understanding the origin of sociality and the costs and benefits of social behaviour in early stages of social evolution. Ceratina bees are an excellent model taxon as this genus has a high species richness with a significant proportion of facultatively social species. In this study, we investigated the social and nesting biology of...
The loss of insect diversity and biomass has been documented in many terrestrial ecosystems. Drivers of this insect decline include climate change, habitat degradation, and pollution. Exposure to airborne particulate matter, such as diesel exhaust particles, may be harmful, especially for insects around urban or industrial areas. Ecotoxicological experiments have shown that...
Social insects often share their colony with individuals of different relatedness levels and life stages. When no reproductive depression is in place, a female must choose whether to stay with her natal group and possibly limit her reproductive potential or leave to establish a new colony. The factors governing and following this decision are still largely unknown. The date stone...
One of the key challenges of evolutionary theory is to determine how cooperation is promoted in different environmental contexts. This is because the costs and benefits of cooperation can be difficult to identify as they have many facets and are often highly context-dependent. To address this challenge, we need new study systems where the costs and benefits of cooperative...
We report field observations of the cosmopolitan terrestrial isopod species Porcellionides pruinosus both inside the nest and following foraging trails of the seed harvester ant Messor ebeninus in the spring of 2022 and 2023. The isopods inside the nest either traveled to deeper tunnels or joined foraging trails. The density of isopods along foraging trails was as high as 60...
Despite the high fragmentation of its natural habitats—grasslands with limestone rocks—a previous study revealed that the ant species Temnothorax nigriceps show no evidence of genetic isolation between populations separated by kilometers of presumably unsuitable landscape. In the present study, we hypothesized that urban anthropogenic structures might allow the species to nest...
In species where both sexes care for offspring, one parent—generally the female—typically provides more care than the other. While current theory offers broad predictions on the evolution of sex differences in parental care, it remains unclear whether ecological factors, such as short-term environmental variation and the intrinsic state of parents, also influence the size of...
Ant nests are biodiversity hot spots, concentrating resources from a wide area that can be exploited by other organisms, known as myrmecophiles. The mite order Mesostigmata includes a wide range of lineages that have become myrmecophiles with many species reliant on ant nests for at least part of their development. The nature of the associations is quite variable, including...
The phylogeography and demographical history of Italian Formica pratensis populations were examined and compared with the Eurasian-wide dataset available for this species and the other red wood ant species Formica lugubris. Forty-eight workers belonging to eight populations from both Alps and Apennines were analysed sequencing a 1.5-kilobase mitochondrial DNA fragment, including...
Natural enemies impose a selective pressure on solitary insects that may favour the evolution of sociality. In the socially polymorphic orchid bee Euglossa viridissima, females found nests solitarily and provision a first batch of brood. After brood maturity, a nest can remain solitary (all offspring disperse) or become social, when one or more subordinate daughters forage for...
Scientific conferences are of immense importance to scientists, but the resulting benefits are only available to those scientists who can actually attend scientific meetings. So far, research at scientific conferences is mostly presented and discussed by researchers from the Global North, while researchers from the Global South are largely excluded due to various reasons. Over...
In this review, we explore the social behavior of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, integrating mechanistic, ecological and evolutionary perspectives. Despite its status as a major laboratory model organism, D. melanogaster’s social life remains generally underappreciated by biologists. Adult flies attract others to food sources through pheromone deposition, leading to group...
Many social insects use pheromone trails to recruit workers to resources. Pheromone trails have some limitations, however. Two major limitations are that they evaporate over time, meaning that more distant locations may be more difficult to recruit precisely to, and that they cannot be removed if laid erroneously, or if they become outdated. Here, we ask whether Lasius niger ants...
The ability to keep stable, healthy colonies in laboratory settings is fundamental for conducting research on ants and particularly important for developing management tools for pest species. An important component for successful ant rearing is a suitable diet and a number of diets for feeding ants have been developed. Calcium caseinate as a protein supplement has been a widely...