Animal societies use nestmate recognition to protect against social cheaters and parasites. In most social insect societies, individuals recognize and exclude any non‐nestmates and the roles of cuticular hydrocarbons as recognition cues are well documented. Some ambrosia beetles live in cooperatively breeding societies with farmed fungus cultures that are challenging to establish, but of very high value once established. Hence, social cheaters that sneak into a nest without paying the costs of nest foundation may be selected. Therefore, nestmate recognition is also expected to exist in ambrosia beetles, but so far nobody has investigated this behavior and its underlying mechanisms. Here we studied the ability for nestmate recognition in the cooperatively breeding ambrosia beetle Xyleborinus saxesenii, combining behavioural observations and cuticular hydrocarbon analyses. Laboratory nests of X. saxesenii were exposed to foreign adult females from the same population, another population and another species. Survival as well as the behaviours of the foreign female were observed. The behaviours of the receiving individuals were also observed. We expected that increasing genetic distance would cause increasing distance in chemical profiles and increasing levels of behavioural exclusion and possibly mortality. Chemical profiles differed between populations and appeared as variable as in other highly social insects. However, we found only very little evidence for the behavioural exclusion of foreign individuals. Interpopulation donors left nests at a higher rate than control donors, but neither their behaviours nor the behaviours of receiver individuals within the nest showed any response to the foreign individual in either of the treatments. These results suggest that cuticular hydrocarbon profiles might be used for communication and nestmate recognition, but that behavioural exclusion of non‐nestmates is either absent in X. saxesenii or that agonistic encounters are so rare or subtle that they could not be detected by our method. Additional studies are needed to investigate this further.

中文翻译：

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表皮碳氢化合物分布高度多样化，但没有证据表明豚草甲虫 Xyleborinus saxesenii 对非亲属有攻击性

动物社会利用巢友识别来防止社会骗子和寄生虫。在大多数社会性昆虫社会中，个体会识别并排除任何非巢友，并且表皮碳氢化合物作为识别线索的作用已得到充分记录。一些豚草甲虫生活在与养殖真菌文化合作繁殖的社会中，这种文化的建立具有挑战性，但一旦建立就具有非常高的价值。因此，不支付筑巢费用而潜入巢穴的社交作弊者可能会被选择。因此，豚草甲虫中也有望存在巢友识别，但到目前为止还没有人研究这种行为及其潜在机制。在这里，我们研究了合作繁殖豚草甲虫的同巢识别能力萨克森小木虫，结合行为观察和表皮碳氢化合物分析。实验室巢萨克森 X.接触来自同一种群、另一个种群和另一个物种的外国成年雌性。观察了外国雌性的生存情况和行为。还观察了接收者的行为。我们预计，遗传距离的增加将导致化学谱中的距离增加，行为排斥程度增加，甚至可能导致死亡率增加。不同种群的化学特征有所不同，并且与其他高度社会性的昆虫一样存在差异。然而，我们只发现很少的证据表明外国人的行为受到排斥。群体间捐赠者离开巢穴的比率高于对照捐赠者，但在这两种处理中，他们的行为和巢穴内接受者个体的行为都没有表现出对外来个体的任何反应。这些结果表明，表皮碳氢化合物分布可能用于交流和同巢伴侣识别，但非同巢伴侣的行为排除在萨克森 X.或者，竞争性遭遇是如此罕见或微妙，以至于我们的方法无法检测到它们。需要更多的研究来进一步调查这一点。