Antenna Cleaning Is Essential for Precise Behavioral Response to Alarm Pheromone and Nestmate-Non-Nestmate Discrimination in Japanese Carpenter Ants ().

Self-grooming of the antennae is frequently observed in ants. This antennal maintenance behavior is presumed to be essential for effective chemical communication but, to our knowledge, this has not yet been well studied. When we removed the antenna-cleaning apparatuses of the Japanese carpenter ant () to limit the self-grooming of the antennae, the worker ants demonstrated the self-grooming gesture as usual, but the antennal surface could not be sufficiently cleaned.

Natural variations of cold tolerance and temperature acclimation in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Temperature is critical for the survival and proliferation of animals, which must be adapted to cope with environmental temperature changes. In this study, we demonstrated natural variations in the phenotypes of temperature tolerance and temperature acclimation of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, and we decoded whole genome sequence of six natural variations, which enabled us to map responsible gene polymorphisms onto specific chromosomal regions. The C.