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Manipulated ants: inducing loyalty to sugar feeders with an alkaloid

Mogensen, Anders; Andersen, Laurits; Givskov, Jesper and Offenberg, Joachim (2024) Manipulated ants: inducing loyalty to sugar feeders with an alkaloid. Pest Management Science, 1, pp. 1-6.

[thumbnail of Mogensen et al 2024 (wood ants on morphine).pdf] PDF - Published Version - English
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Document available online at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ps.8049


Summary in the original language of the document

BACKGROUND: Wood ants are promising biocontrol agents in fruit plantations because they prey on pest insects and inhibit plant diseases. However, these ants also attend plant-feeding homopterans to harvest their honeydew secretions, thereby increasing their numbers. This problem can be solved by offering ants alternative sugar sources that are more attractive than honeydew. From natural interactions, it is known that some species manipulate mutualistic partners toward loyalty by adding alkaloids to the food they offer their mutualists. Inspired by this, the addition of alkaloids might be used to make ants loyal to artificial sugar feeders and thus used to reduce populations of ant-farmed homopterans in ant-mediated biological control. We aimed to explore whether wood ants (Formica polyctena) would develop a taste preference for morphine-containing sugar solutions in two-choice laboratory tests.
RESULTS: After having fed on a morphine/sugar solution for 1 week, ants showed a significant preference for morphine solutions compared with equal concentration sugar solutions without morphine. Furthermore, ants lost this preference after 6– 9 days on a morphine-free diet.
CONCLUSION: The results show that wood ants react to morphine in their food, enabling chemical manipulation of their behavior, most likely through a taste preference. Thus, ants are susceptible to manipulation by mutualistic partners in natural interactions and furthermore may be manipulated artificially in biocontrol programs to avoid ant-mediated build-up of homopteran populations.


EPrint Type:Journal paper
Agrovoc keywords:
Language
Value
URI
English
biological control
http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_918
Subjects: Environmental aspects > Biodiversity and ecosystem services
Research affiliation: Denmark > Organic RDD 5 > Open Field Biocontrol
Deposited By: Offenberg, Dr Joachim
ID Code:53077
Deposited On:04 Apr 2024 12:16
Last Modified:04 Apr 2024 12:16
Document Language:English
Status:Published
Refereed:Peer-reviewed and accepted

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