Avoid mistakes when choosing a new home: Nest choice and adoption of Leptothorax ant queens

In ants, mating and colony founding are critical steps in the life of ant queens. Outside of their nests, young queens are exposed to intense predation. Therefore, they are expected to have evolved behavior to accurately and quickly locate a nesting place. However, data on the early life history of female reproductives are still lacking. Leptothorax gredleri is a suitable model organism to study the behavior of young queens. Reproductives can be reared under artificial conditions and readily mate in the laboratory. After mating, L. gredleri queens have the options to found solitarily, seek adoption into another colony, or return into their natal nest. In this study, we investigated the decision-making processes of female sexuals before and after mating. In particular, we tested whether female sexuals use chemical cues to find their way back to the nest, studied if they prefer their own nest over other nesting sites and followed the adoption dynamics of mated queens over 8 weeks (plus hibernation and spring). We showed that female sexuals and freshly mated queens spent more time on substrate previously used by workers from their own colony and from another colony than on a blank substrate. This discriminatory capability of queens appears to be lost in old, reproductive queens. Nest choice experiments showed that female sexuals and freshly mated queens can distinguish their own nest while old mated queens do not. When reintroduced in their maternal colony, young queens were readily adopted, but a few weeks later aggression against young queens led to their emigration from the maternal nest and eventually also death.