0000000001141482
AUTHOR
Foitzik Susanne
showing 2 related works from this author
Age, pathogen exposure, but not maternal care shape offspring immunity in an insect with facultative family life.
2016
Background To optimize their resistance against pathogen infection, individuals are expected to find the right balance between investing into the immune system and other life history traits. In vertebrates, several factors were shown to critically affect the direction of this balance, such as the developmental stage of an individual, its current risk of infection and/or its access to external help such as parental care. However, the independent and/or interactive effects of these factors on immunity remain poorly studied in insects. Results Here, we manipulated maternal presence and pathogen exposure in families of the European earwig Forficula auricularia to measure whether and how the sur…
Spatial structure and nest demography reveal the influence of competition, parasitism and habitat quality on slavemaking ants and their hosts
2010
Abstract Background Natural communities are structured by intra-guild competition, predation or parasitism and the abiotic environment. We studied the relative importance of these factors in two host-social parasite ecosystems in three ant communities in Europe (Bavaria) and North America (New York, West Virginia). We tested how these factors affect colony demography, life-history and the spatial pattern of colonies, using a large sample size of more than 1000 colonies. The strength of competition was measured by the distance to the nearest competitor. Distance to the closest social parasite colony was used as a measure of parasitism risk. Nest sites (i.e., sticks or acorns) are limited in …