Coevolution Between Slavemaking Ants and Their Hosts

奴隶制造蚂蚁和它们的宿主之间的共同进化。赫伯斯造奴蚁是一种“社会寄生虫”，只能通过从其他物种身上捕捉工蚁来生存。这些被捕获的工蚁在奴隶蚁的巢穴中孵化出来，开始觅食、打扫、喂养幼虫等等，奴隶蚁除了寻找其他宿主物种的殖民地之外，几乎什么也不做。当奴隶制造者找到一个宿主殖民地时，他们会上演一场“奴隶袭击”，他们会进入宿主巢穴，伤害或致残那些保卫他们巢穴的人，然后清除脓包回到他们自己的奴隶制造巢穴。我们已经发现了这两个物种如何相互作用的地理差异：在纽约的奥尔巴尼附近的一个地点，奴隶制造者非常凶猛，主人强烈抵制袭击。相比之下，在西弗吉尼亚州山区的一个地点，相互作用更为温和;奴隶制造者在突袭中杀死的宿主很少，宿主本身也很少抵抗。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袭击以宿主死亡告终的频率，一个给定的奴隶制造者巢穴一年中有多少次奴隶袭击，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之间的奴隶袭击将提供对本地化相互作用的洞察。最后，遗传，生态和行为将被分析的“共同进化的军备竞赛”的比喻，已被证明是有用的其他寄生虫-宿主关系的研究。

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.