﻿Mandibular Patterns for Termite Nest Builders
Lara Oliveira Clemente, Universidade Federal de Viçosa
Reginaldo Constantino, Universidade Federal de Brasília
Og DeSouza, Universidade Federal de Viçosa

	Termites colonies usually present two castes, the reproductive's caste and the non-reproductive's caste. The non-reproductive's caste includes two morphological castes: the soldier's caste and the workers' caste. Workers and soldiers, differ not only on their morphology but also on their activities. Morphological traits of organisms are modulated by forces of selection created by complex interactions between some factors, including environmental circumstances, behavior and genetic information. The builders would be under pressures related mostly to the construction task and foraging, participating as a coadjuvant on the defense since the nest construction itself is a defense strategy. Conversely, the pressures related to defense and foraging would be the most intense for the inquilines, since they are intruders on the nest. We hypothesized here that the worker's castes of inquilines and builders would present differents mandible patterns as reflex to their differents sets of main activities.We used the Left Mandible Index (LMI) as parameter to compare the mandibles of inquilines and workers. Data were restricted to all Neotropical genera of Termitidae (79 genera) and were compiled from the termite taxonomical literature, either extracting the worker’s LMI or calculating it directly from mandible drawings normally available in these papers. The results support our hypothesis that constructor's mandibles are different from those of inquiline workers. The LMI can be said to significantly affect the probability of being an inquiline. Moreover, we found a LMI that characterizes the group of builder termites of the Neotropical Termitidae genera.
Financiamento: Capes

Key words: nest-construction, mandibles, morphology, inquilinism

