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Do Florida harvester ant colonies (Pogonomyrmex badius) have a nest architecture "plan?"

E. O. Wilson and I recently argued that a renewed emphasis on scientific natural history would reap many benefits (Tschinkel and Wilson 2014), and we are gratified that, inspired by our article, Ecology has created this new section called The Scientific Naturalist. A scientific naturalist is, first and foremost, an observer. Something in nature falls pleasantly on a perceptive part of his or her brain, drawing attention to some mysterious or charming phenomenon or creature. Initially, this leads to detailed observations and descriptions, but eventually it may also lead to experiments that test possible causal relationships. Because I am a myrmecologist, this charm and mystery usually involves ants, and I have poked into their many secrets for decades. One of the abiding ant mysteries is the construction of underground nests. Many species of ants excavate subterranean nests ranging in size from a few cm deep to monumental nests tens of meters in horizontal and vertical extent. When the hollow space of ant nests is filled with a casting material such as dental plaster, molten metal, cement, or wax, the cast reveals the smallest details of the space the ants created underground. Casts of a couple of dozen different ant species’ nests have partially bracketed the range of architectures and shown that most ant nests are based on a simple structural “shishkebab” unit consisting of more or less horizontal, flattened chambers connected by a more or less vertical shaft (Tschinkel 2015). All the features of these units—chamber size, shape, and spacing—evolve independently of one another creating the observed range of speciestypical architectures (Tschinkel 2015). The nest architecture, division of labor and social structure of the Florida harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex badius has been described in great detail (Tschinkel 1999, Kwapich and Tschinkel 2013). Having described this speciestypical architecture, the challenging question for the scientific naturalist becomes, how do the ants make these nests in the dark, without a leader and without an apparent plan? Or maybe they do have a plan, in the sense that the colony would willingly accept some architectures but not others. The challenge for the inquisitive naturalist is to create a subterranean ant nest that has some resemblance to a real one so that it can be presented with a range of modifications. This is actually less difficult than it sounds. When water is frozen in copper molds in the shapes of the chambers of the Florida harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex badius (Fig. 1A), the result is an ice facsimile of the hollow space of a nest chamber (Fig. 1B). Ice chambers can be made in a wide range of shapes, both similar to real chambers or completely unlike them. These ice chambers are then buried in the field at specified depths and connected with a plastic tube. When the ice melts and the tube is withdrawn, the result is a madetoorder subterranean ant nest (Tschinkel 2013). We can then ask what the ants “like,” that is, what they will accept as some approximation of the natural architecture they create themselves, and what deviates so much that they do not accept it. In the natural nest of P. badius, the largest, most complex, most closely spaced chambers are always at the top (Tschinkel 2004). With depth, chambers become simpler in outline and spaced farther apart (Appendix S1: Fig. S1A). What if we reversed this chamber order (but not spacing), so that the largest, most complex chamber was at the bottom, and the smallest, simplest at Ecology, 98(4), 2017, pp. 1176–1178 © 2017 by the Ecological Society of America The Scientific Naturalist