Looking for food from a giant ant's perspective

SUAREZ, ANDREW V; TUBARO, PABLO L; HANISCH, PRISCILA E

Minneapolis

Conferencia; International Society for Behavioral Ecology conference; 2018

University of Minnesota

Social organisms benefit from group foraging behavior. However, if individuals overlap widely in the areas they search for food these benefits may not be proportional to the number of individuals that take part in searching for food. We examined foraging behavior and route fidelity in colonies of Dinoponera australis. Their large worker size, lack of nestmate recruitment while foraging, and relatively small colonies makes D. australis a useful model to study individual and colony foraging strategies. We marked 42 individual foragers and mapped 120 foraging routes to test the hypotheses that each ant specialized in a particular area around the nest, and that nestmates exhibited little overlap in foraging area. Over 50% of the foragers exhibited a high degree of route fidelity. Nest-mate pairs foraging areas overlapped less than 10% for the majority of the foragers in 4 of the 6 colonies. Our results suggest that D. australis workers exhibit strong route fidelity which increases foraging efficiency and search area which may be particularly important for a species with relatively few foragers. The lower route fidelity and increased overlap in foraging area of workers seen in two colonies suggest that this species may adjust foraging behavior depending on food availability.