Temporal and Acoustic attributes of the pathogen alarm response and head banging behaviour in Zootermopsis angusticollis

The primitive dampwood termite Zootermopsis angusticollis uses vibrational communication to warn nestmates about dangers facing the colony. One mode of vibrational communication is the pathogen alarm response (PAR), in which the termite vibrates in a “seizure-like” manner warning nestmates of the presence of lethal conidia concentrations of the entomopathogenic fungus Metarhizium anisopliae. A second stereotypical vibrational display involves head-banging behavior (HB) following a nest disturbance. To identify whether these two context-dependent vibrational forms of communication differ in their physical attributes, an accelerometer was attached to the bottom of a Petri dish to record the signals during PAR and HB. Results show that the physical attributes (frequency of pulses, amplitude of the pulse, number of pulses in a train and number of trains in a 10 minute period) differed between the two signals. This represents the first in-depth analysis of the physical and temporal characteristics of both behaviors.