Coevolution Between Slavemaking Ants and Their Hosts

制造奴隶的蚂蚁和它们的宿主之间的共同进化琼·M·赫伯斯制造奴隶的蚂蚁是“社会寄生虫”，只有通过从另一个物种捕获工蚁蛹才能生存。这些被捕获的工蚁在奴隶制造者的巢中孵化出来，开始觅食、清洁、喂养幼虫等。奴隶制造者蚂蚁除了寻找寄主物种的其他群体外，几乎什么也不做。当奴隶制造者找到一个宿主蜂群时，他们就会上演一场“奴隶突袭”，进入宿主蜂巢，伤害或残害那些守卫他们的蜂巢的人，并移走蛹回到他们自己的奴隶制造蜂巢。我们发现了这两个物种相互作用的地理差异：在纽约奥尔巴尼附近的一个地点，奴隶主极其凶猛，主人强烈抵制袭击。相比之下，西弗吉尼亚州山区的互动则更为良性；奴隶贩子在突袭中几乎没有杀死宿主，宿主本身也几乎没有抵抗。在佛蒙特州伯灵顿附近的第三个地点，蚂蚁表现出介于这两个极端之间的特征。分子生态学的强大工具将被用来揭示奴隶掠夺以宿主死亡结束的频率，一个特定的奴隶制造者巢每年安装多少奴隶掠夺，以及对它们的宿主种群的影响。其次，在蚂蚁、寄生虫和从同一站点与不同站点收集的宿主之间安装奴隶突袭，将提供对相互作用本地化程度的洞察。最后，将根据“共同进化军备竞赛”的比喻对遗传、生态和行为进行分析，这一比喻已被证明在研究其他寄生虫-宿主关系时很有用。

Coevolution between slavemaking ants and their hostsJoan M. HerbersSlavemaking ants are "social parasites" that can survive only by capturing worker pupae from another species. Those captured workers hatch out in the slavemaker nest and start to forage, clean, feed the larvae, and so on. The slavemaker ants do virtually nothing except find other colonies of host species. When the slavemakers find a host colony, they stage a "slave raid" in which they enter the host nest, injure or maim those defending their nest, and remove pupae to return to their own slavemaking nest. We have uncovered geographic variation in how these two species interact: in a site near Albany, New York, slavemakers are extremely fierce and hosts resist raids strongly. By contrast, the interaction in a site in mountainous West Virginia is more benign; slavemakers kill few hosts during a raid, and the hosts themselves offer little resistance. In a third site near Burlington, Vermont, the ants show characteristics intermediate between these two extremes. The powerful tools of molecular ecology will be used uncover how often slave raids end in death of the host, how many slave raids a given slavemaker nest mounts in a year, and what the impact on their host population is. Second, mounting slave raids between ants parasites and hosts collected from the same site versus different sites will offer insight to how localized interactions can be. Finally, the genetic, ecological, and behavioral will be analyzed in terms of the "coevolutionary arms race" metaphor that has proven useful in studies of other parasite-host relationships.