0000000000308198
AUTHOR
Udi Segev
Ant Abundance along a Productivity Gradient: Addressing Two Conflicting Hypotheses
The number of individuals within a population or community and their body size can be associated with changes in resource supply. While these relationships may provide a key to better understand the role of abiotic vs. biotic constraints in animal communities, little is known about the way size and abundance of organisms change along resource gradients. Here, we studied this interplay in ants, addressing two hypotheses with opposite predictions regarding variation in population densities along resource gradients- the 'productivity hypothesis' and the 'productivity-based thinning hypothesis'. The hypotheses were tested in two functional groups of ground-dwelling ants that are directly primar…
Pace-of-life in a social insect: behavioral syndromes in ants shift along a climatic gradient
Lay SummaryLinks between behavioral traits can shift with the local climate. We show that behavioral associations with temperature not only occur across, but also within populations. At warmer sites ant colonies increased their exploration and foraging activity, but were less aggressive. Moreover, at these warmer sites, more positive links were found between behaviors within populations compared to colder sites, where more negative links prevailed. Our study suggests that associations between behaviors shift along climatic gradients.
Data from: Pace-of-life in a social insect: behavioral syndromes in ants shift along a climatic gradient
Behavioral syndromes are correlations between behavioral traits, but their selective advantage under different environmental conditions is not well understood. Here, we used the pace-of-life hypothesis to predict how behavioral syndromes could vary along climatic gradients. This hypothesis states that populations experiencing different ecological conditions should differ in suites of physiological characteristics associated with behavioral and life-history traits. We examined the persistence of behavioral syndromes at multiple levels in the ant Temnothorax longispinosus along a climatic gradient in north-eastern USA. “Across populations”, we predicted that proactive phenotypes, which show h…