Coevolution Between Slavemaking Ants and Their Hosts

slavemaking蚂蚁和他们之间的共同进化hostsJoan m . HerbersSlavemaking蚂蚁“社会寄生虫”,只能通过捕获工人生存蛹从另一个物种。那些被捕获的工蜂在奴隶贩子的巢里孵化出来，开始觅食、清洁、喂养幼虫，等等。奴隶蚂蚁除了寻找其他寄主物种之外，实际上什么也不做。当奴隶制造者发现一个寄主群体时，他们会发动“奴隶突袭”，他们会进入寄主巢穴，伤害或残害那些保卫他们巢穴的人，并取出蛹返回自己的奴隶巢穴。我们已经发现了这两个物种相互作用的地理差异：在纽约州奥尔巴尼附近的一个地方，奴隶贩子极其凶猛，而主人则强烈抵抗袭击。相比之下，在西弗吉尼亚州山区的一个遗址中，这种相互作用更为温和；奴隶贩子在突袭中杀死的宿主很少，宿主本身也没有什么抵抗力。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袭击以宿主死亡告终的频率，一个给定的奴隶巢穴在一年内有多少次奴隶袭击，以及对宿主种群的影响。其次，从同一地点收集的蚂蚁、寄生虫和宿主与不同地点收集的蚂蚁之间的奴隶袭击，将为本地化的相互作用提供洞见。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，该比喻已被证明在其他寄生虫-宿主关系的研究中很有用。

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.