Site Fidelity in Insects

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Many animals
demonstrate site fidelity, which means the tendency to return to certain places. You can think of it as "site faithfulness" [1]. Salmon return to the same stream where their parents and ancestors have gone to breed, elephants in Africa migrate across deserts to return to rivers, humans go on pilgrimages, and birds migrate... If the animals are going on a trip, chances are they are not just wandering and instead are following some inner compass. Think about it this way. If you are traveling across a continent, you probably are going to stop at some rest areas. The best rest areas or breeding destinations or neighborhoods to live in have always been beneficial to you and your ancestors, and so you always go there because you can count on it having the things you are looking for: water, shelter, food, mates, suitable habitat, etc. [5] But what happens if these reliable places start becoming unreliable, or even downright dangerous?

One of the most apparent examples in the insect kingdom is the Monarch butterfly returning to Mexican forests every fall for the winter. They come from all over North America to just a few places in Mexico every single year. But they have to fly through your yard and over the highway and through cities and across agricultural fields to get there. Each of these developments contains a host of dangers for the monarchs, like pesticides and cars, and this just adds stress to the butterfly's already strenuous journey. That is why their kind is in trouble right now. Habitat fragmentation and degradation have eliminated some of their reliable paths through the North American woodlands and prairies and rivers.

The Xerces Society. https://xerces.org/monarchs/conservation-efforts

Hymenopterans are well-studied in the field of insect site fidelity because they go out to forage and then return to their nest. They have home territories and work together in different roles to get stuff done. They have tiny brains, but they have enough memory capacity to remember and decide where to go and they can also use pheromones to communicate and "write a sticky note". A study on red harvester ants [3] showed that the foragers cover various distances on their foraging trails, up to 20 meters away from the nest, but most are within a half a meter. When some food is found, they go back and forth bringing food to the nest, and other ants will also help out when they sense what's going on.

Marching Ants, iStock.

With one species of rock ants, Richardson et al. found that the longer an ant stayed somewhere was correlated with a higher chance of returning sooner. The "visited sites become more attractive with each visit... previous site‐visits influence future behaviour, self‐attracting walks are history dependent". [2]

In a honey bee hive, queens have their attendants that stay close, the other workers go out to forage, the nurses stay near the young, and drones wander around. Another interesting result of this is that disease from outside the hive that a worker carries in does not come into contact with the Queen since she is just surrounded by her attendants and doesn't really come into contact with workers.

Heliconius butterflies don't have a nest they return to, but they do return to the same general places. Scientists kidnapped butterflies and released them and they flew in the direction of their home. [4]

For more charismatic animals, specifically mammals, scientists need to monitor long-term for site fidelity in order to protect certain critical sites and the pathways between them. [5] But for our often-unnoticed insect friends, it is much harder to know what to do to protect them. Everyone knows that monarchs need milkweed, but what about other insects? 

Sources:

[1] https://doi.org/10.1093/auk/124.3.1085

[2] https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12751

[3] https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arp041

[4] https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13976 

[5] https://www.earth.com/news/animals-with-strong-site-fidelity-face-an-uncertain-future/

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