Kay et al RSPB-2013-2374 worker survival, metapleural blockage experiment, solitary

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).

2012年1月，我们开展实验以探究蚂蚁后胸腺（metapleural gland）——一种位于蚂蚁胸部、可分泌抗菌物质的特化腺体——的分泌物是否会影响其饮食相关免疫。为完成该实验，我们以1P:3C或3P:1C的饲料配比饲养12个蚁群，饲养时长为18天。随后，我们对每个蚁群中的10只工蚁使用指甲油封堵其后胸腺，构建5组独居蚂蚁或1组工蚁集群，并如前文所述用绿僵菌（Metarhizium）处理所有受试蚂蚁。我们沿用前述方法评估受试蚂蚁的存活率。此外，我们使用从野外蚁群采集的工蚁开展对照实验，结果证实封堵后胸腺本身并不会对存活率产生影响（考克斯比例风险模型（Cox Proportional Hazards）：似然比χ²=0.087，自由度d.f.=1，p=0.762，样本量n=40）。