Ants adopt after colonies fight
A UF researcher found that a species of ant will adopt members of conquered colonies.
Kathleen Rudolph, a recently graduated UF biology doctoral student, found victorious colonies of acacia ants in Africa may adopt to help replenish their colony’s numbers. Her team studied the ants for about nine months by putting 18 colonies into nine groups and having them fight over territory.
Fights between colonies occur when colonies outgrow their homes and need to expand, she said. So they fight to the death for more territory.
Rudolph said she wanted to look at how winning colonies responded to losing members who died. She wanted to see if the ants were vulnerable after a win and whether they would adopt surviving ants to offset the losses.
Rudolph said she first thought the victorious ants would take ants in their early life stages, including the larva and pupa.
Instead, researchers found the colony would take almost anyone, she said.
“We found, in some cases, the winner colony doesn’t end up killing the loser colony’s queen,” Rudolph said.
The study was conducted by bending and tying together the acacia tree the ants live in, she said.
The research also showed that, eight months after the fight, the genetic makeup of the ants changed due to the influx of adopted ants, she said.
“I hope it encourages more exploration into how ant’s recognition systems works,” Rudolph said.
- John Avery Guyton
UF researcher spearheads butterfly study
A UF researcher led the discovery of a new butterfly species.
Andrew Warren authored a study on the Oeneis tanana butterfly, which The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera published March 15.
The last species found under the Oeneis genus was found 28 years ago, he said.
Warren, the senior collections manager at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the Florida Museum of Natural History, worked with a graduate student and realized the butterfly may be an ancient hybrid, according to the study.
The Oeneis tanana is found around the Tanana River in Alaska, where Warren discovered the butterfly while curating a collection of a different Oeneis species in 2010.
Researches from around the world — including St. Petersburg, Russia; Seattle, Washington; and Dallas, Texas — analyzed the butterfly for years.
Researchers linked the new butterfly’s features to one species and its DNA to another, leading them to the hybrid theory.
“Once we study the genome, we’ll know if it’s a hybrid,” Warren said.
Warren said he’ll test the theory when he visits Alaska in summer 2017 to collect more butterflies and take them home for analyzing.
“It sort of forces a re-evaluation of that whole genus, actually,” he said.
- Anisha Dutt
