Kay et al RSPB-2013-2374 worker survival, metapleural blockage experiment, 5-ant groups

In January 2012, we tested whether secretions from the metapleural gland (a specialized gland on the thorax of ants that produces antibiotic secretions) influences diet-related immunity. To do this, we reared 12 colonies on either the 1P:3C or 3P:1C diet for 18 days. We then blocked the metapleural gland (using nail polish) on 10 ants per colony, created 5 solitary-ant or 1 worker-group sets, and treated all ants with Metarhizium as described above. We assessed survivorship as above. We used workers sampled from field colonies to show that blocking metapleural glands per se did not affect survivorship (Cox Proportional Hazards: L-R χ2 = 0.087, d.f. = 1, p = 0.762, n=40).