TY - JOUR T1 - Within the fortress: A specialized parasite of ants is not evicted JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/002501 SP - 002501 AU - Emilia S. Gracia AU - Charissa de Bekker AU - Jim Russell AU - Kezia Manlove AU - Ephraim Hanks AU - David P. Hughes Y1 - 2014/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/02/12/002501.abstract N2 - Every level of biological organization from cells to societies require that composing units come together to form parts of a bigger unit (1). Our knowledge of how behavioral manipulating parasites change social interactions between social hosts is limited. Here we use an endoparasite to observe changes in social interactions between infected and healthy ants, using trophallaxis (liquid food exchange) and spatial data as proxies for food sharing and social segregation. We found no change in trophallaxis (p-value = 0.5156). By using K-function and nearest neighbor analyses we did see a significant difference in spatial segregation on day 3 (less than 8 millimeters; p-value < 0.05). These results suggest healthy individuals are unable to detect the parasite within the host. ER -