Fig. 3

Minors but not majors display high olfactory sensitivity and trail following behaviors to DOA. A Solvent (ND96) normalized EAG responses showing that minors exhibited robust, dose-dependent excitatory responses to DOA whereas majors displayed hormetic responses that becomes smaller as concentration increased except at the highest concentration which saw a return to baseline (n=5; individual data values can be found in Additional file 9). Dots represent the mean response and error bars represent S.E.M. The lines are best fit dose response curves. B The mean number of instances in which minors and majors followed either the solvent (ND96) control or DOA (10⁻⁹ M) trail (n=7; two-way ANOVA with Tukey’s correction, P-value: * < 0.05, ** < 0.01). C–F Density contour plots pooled from the trail-following bioassays that correspond to the foraging arena with the darkest regions indicating areas of lowest density where ants were less likely to be found and the brightest regions indicating areas of max density where ants were most likely to be found. The trail (ND96 or DOA) was located along the center of the foraging arena along its length, and the white lines superimposed on the density contour plot correspond to each discrete instance in which an ant followed the trail (n=7)