Find in Library

The yellow crazy ant (<i>Anoplolepis gracilipes</i> (Smith, 1857)) is a prominent invasive species exhibiting variable population dynamics. Through collecting long-term climate data and validating field surveys with MaxEnt SDM projections, our results indicated that winter temperature and precipitation accumulation strongly influence the population dynamics. An aggression analysis showed that <i>A. gracilipes</i> nests with higher aggression levels (over 2.5 scores) experienced a higher mean maximum temperature (31.84 ± 0.43 °C) and lower prevalence of <i>w</i>Agra (84.8 ± 4.70%) in <i>A. gracilipes</i> from June to October. The nest manipulation and aggression experiments confirmed that temperature increases aggression (1.3 to 2.8 scores) among <i>A. gracilipes</i> workers due to the reduced prevalence of <i>w</i>Agra. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case of a notable reduction in the prevalence of <i>Wolbachia</i> (100 to 66%) within a colony of <i>A. gracilipes</i> while maintaining stable nests for further experiments.