| dc.description.abstract | Soil insects process the vibrational messages from environments or conspecific partners for
emergencies or communication very often. From the past study, these messages generally
are low frequency and pure tone vibration. Snake ants, Leptogenys kitteli, have the same
stridulatory behaviors with the ants which are able to communicate in vibrational signals.
I would examine two questions: first, is L. kitteli sensitive to a specific frequency; second,
whether the ants perform alarm behavior while recepting vibrations?
In the experiments, snake ants were stimulated with low frequency vibrations from 15 Hz to
1500 Hz and 3 amplitudes, 0.05 g, 0.1 g, 0.2 g, to examined what responses they had. The
general behaviors the snake ants had when given vibrational stimuli were rushing around
and out of the nests. They reacted sensitively to two frequency areas, one was about 120 to
135 Hz and the other weaker one was the former fundamental frequency, 60 Hz. I thought
it was caused from the connection structure between organism and substrate. When the
60 Hz vibration transmitted to appendages, the connection structure also produced some
120 Hz harmonic frequency to stimulate the receptors.
Furthermore, after the maximum activity, the ants subsided quickly at first, but after
few seconds, the subsiding trend slowed down. The ants exhibited great interaction with
each other by using antennae. I thought they went from independent individual stage
into social interaction stage. Amplitude and frequency determined the duration of the
individual stage. At high amplitudes and sensitive frequencies, the durations lasted longer.
In addition, they also had positive correlation with the magnitude of measurable activities.
As the stimulations triggered lower activities of the ants, the durations also decreased, even
vanished. Thus, the ants skipped the individual stage into the social stage. The study has
established 120 to 135Hz are important signals to snake ants’ alarm behavior. However,
which role these frequencies play: predator-closing cue or nestmate-communicating signal,
I still need to further work to examine.
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