Figure 1.
Spatial fidelity of M. rubra workers within colonies.
Presented is the proportion of scans a worker of a given origin (O = outside, E = entrance, B = brood and Q = queen) was detected at the one of the four monitored locations during experiment 1. Presented are medians and quartiles, circles indicate outliers. Significant differences between the positions (p<0.0001) are indicated by different lower case letters on top of the figure.
Figure 2.
Spatial flexibility of M. rubra workers.
The graph presents the proportion of scans where an individual was detected at one of the three monitored positions of subnests containing spatial specialists of one type only. We recorded workers present on the outside of the nest (O), within the nest but not at the brood (N) and workers at the brood (B). During this experiment we never detected workers directly in the entrance and consequently decided to monitor workers near the entrance but inside the nest (N). Workers were found more often at the position they were originally located in even after the alteration of colony task demand. Presented are medians and quartiles circles indicate outliers. Significant differences between the positions are indicated by different lower case letters on top of the figure (all p<0.0001).
Figure 3.
MDS ordination of the worker personality dimensions (2D stress = 0.11), based on euclidian distances.
Each symbol represents an individual worker. Lines indicate the contribution of each behavioral trait to the separation among the three groups investigated (B = brood, O = outside and E = entrance). All three groups are significantly different from each other (all p<0.007). The three main contributors to group separation are phototactic (Experiment 3a), activity (3c) and brood-care tendency (3f). The interest in protein foraging (3e), exploration (3b), non-nestmates (3d) and aggression (3g) contributed to a lesser extent.
Figure 4.
We present the differences between the five analyzed CHC substance classes (left to right).
Proportion of the five substance classes. Median and quartiles are presented. Significant differences between the four groups investigated (B = brood, O = outside, Q = queen, E = Entrance) are indicated by the lower-case letters on top of the individual graphs (all significant p<0.003; ns = no significant difference). Circles indicate outliers.