1985] 
Stuart — Leptothorax curvispinosus 
75 
The queen status of colonies at the beginning of the experiment 
often differed from their queen status at the time of collection due to 
the occasional death of queens or the dealation of offspring (see 
Table 1). At the beginning of the experiment, there was no signifi- 
cant difference in the number of workers present in colonies which 
were queenless, monogynous or polygynous at that time (t-tests, 
P> 0.05). However, worker numbers at the beginning of the exper- 
iment did vary depending on what the queen status of colonies had 
been at the time of collection, with originally queenless colonies 
having significantly fewer workers than colonies which had been 
either monogynous (t = 4.241, df =49, P < 0.001) or polygynous 
(t = 3.347, df = 18, P < 0.0 1 ) when collected. This variation will be 
considered in the analysis of the results. 
Results 
During the course of the experiment, 12 of the 57 colonies (21.1%) 
became polydomous (see Table 1 and Figure 1). Six colonies were 
observed to be polydomous on Day 1 (10.5%); and 2 more became 
polydomous by Day 2 (14.0%). Thereafter, the number of polydo- 
mous colonies fluctuated between 2 and 7 (3.5-12.3%). Some colo- 
nies appeared to remain polydomous only briefly (e.g. #8, #19), but 
others apparently persisted in this condition for long periods (e.g. 
#1, #15, #17, #52, #57) (see Figure 1). One colony (#52) appeared to 
remain polydomous for the entire experiment (76 days). Two colo- 
nies became polydomous, reverted to monodomy, and then again 
became polydomous (#14, #15). Other colonies may also have 
undergone repeated fissions and fusions between observations. 
There was no discernible pattern to how polydomous colonies 
distributed themselves between the two nests. Often only a few 
workers and larvae were present in the second nest, but at times 
large segments of the colonies including dealate queens and alate 
reproductives could be found in the second nest. The distribution 
for particular colonies tended to fluctuate between observations, 
and often the second nest (or the original nest) gradually became 
depopulated over several days prior to fusion. These kinds of fluc- 
tuations indicate that polydomy in these ants is a very dynamic 
phenomenon and provide considerable scope for future research. 
Budding occurred in queenless, monogynous and polygynous 
colonies containing from 30 to 1 70 workers (see Table 1 ), but colony 
