Fig 5. Worker's context promoting aggressive responses.

The nest environment provides various cues that might modulate a worker’s context and eventually promotes aggression against competing con- and heterospecifics. A sociocentric modulation of defense of highly profitable food sources is plausible, when many foraging workers are gathering at the source. Some ant species use chemical markings, indicating the home range and areas with potentially valuable resources, which are defended mainly against heterospecifics [50]. Such a geocentric modulation of context is more stable over time and less flexible than a sociocentric modulation. Solitary foragers like the desert ant Cataglyphis can access the homing vector of their path integration, and the length of the homing vector is negatively correlated with the social context of the forager for an aggressive response [57; 63]. Such egocentric modulation of context seems most important for species without mass recruitment but might also act together with geocentric and sociocentric modulation in other species.