Habitat features and colony characteristics influencing ant personality and its fitness consequences.

ABSTRACT: Several factors can influence individual and group behavioral variation that can have important fitness consequences. In this study, we tested how two habitat types (seminatural meadows and meadows invaded by Solidago plants) and factors like colony and worker size and nest density influence behavioral (activity, meanderness, exploration, aggression, and nest displacement) variation on different levels of the social organization of Myrmica rubra ants and how these might affect the colony productivity. We assumed that the factors within the two habitat types exert different selective pressures on individual and colony behavioral variation that affects colony productivity. Our results showed individual-/colony-specific expression of both mean and residual behavioral variation o

SUBMITTER: Maak I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7937185 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan-Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature