Antennal Amputation and its implications in the Indian Queenless Ant

Yadav, Abhinav (2014) Antennal Amputation and its implications in the Indian Queenless Ant. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

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Abstract

Every organism requires perceiving its environment. Antenna is one such organ in insects which allow them to perceive their environment. Antenna is involved in many tasks which make it very important for the organism’s survival. Two major inputs which an antenna perceives are chemical cues and mechanical perturbations. Therefore it is important to study about it. To perform the experiments tandem leaders from eight colonies were chosen. These individuals were then manipulated and the level of manipulation was increased in each groups. Three different tasks were chosen to test the importance of antenna on three different days with a gap of a day. First task tested the importance of antenna in duration of food search, and the results reviled that antennal manipulation does not affect its performance. In second task tandem runs were observed for each tandem leaders in each group. In this task, parameters at level of colony does not show any change however severely amputated individuals (both antenna amputee) showed significant decrease in performance in all domains. Third task was related to nest mate recognition in which the chosen individuals were kept in a non-nest environment along with a nest mate and non-nest mate. In this task none of the observed behaviors showed any significant difference. In terms of plasticity, at colony level plasticity exists however it completely lack at level of individuals. The colony completely recovers from the damage by recruiting additional leaders. However, both antenna amputees does not show any sign of recovery across days. From this study we can conclude that antenna does play important role in tandem run and colony allow itself to recover from damages indicating plasticity. Further study regarding the importance of antenna will help in shedding light on insect’s interaction with its niche.

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