harvester ants are known as one of the most renowned bio-disturbances in the arid and semi-arid ecosystems that affecte vegetation by collecting seeds and harvesting plants. it seems that physiognomy of plant association in steppe shrub land of roodshoor, saveh, iran has been highly changed by harvester ants’ activities that caused to conduct this research. the study was carried out on active a...

INTRODUCTION We studied the richness and abundance of ant species, their bacteria and the bacteria isolated from patient clinical samples. METHODS Ants were collected with baited traps at 64 sites in a public hospital in São Luis, State of Maranhão, Brazil. RESULTS In total, 1,659 ants from 14 species were captured. The most frequent species were Crematogaster victima, Solenopsis saevissima...

Attine ants engage in a quadripartite symbiosis with fungi they cultivate for food, specialized garden parasites, and parasite-inhibiting bacteria. Molecular phylogenetic evidence supports an ancient host-pathogen association between the ant-cultivar mutualism and the garden parasite. Here we show that ants rear the antibiotic-producing bacteria in elaborate cuticular crypts, supported by uniqu...

Cultivation of fungi for food by fungus-growing ants (Attini: Formicidae) originated about 50 million years ago. The subsequent evolutionary history of this agricultural symbiosis was inferred from phylogenetic and population-genetic patterns of 553 cultivars isolated from gardens of "primitive" fungus-growing ants. These patterns indicate that fungus-growing ants succeeded at domesticating mul...

During a recent investigation of ant-mimicking arthropods in Costa Rica, two new species salticid spiders were discovered. Here, I provide descriptions the species, Myrmapana costaricaensis sp. nov. and Corcovetella galianoae The former has forms; dark form resembles Neoponera ants, while light Pseudomyrmex ants. Camponotus

In this paper is introduce "flying" ants in Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). In traditional ACO algorithms the ants construct their solution regarding one step forward. In proposed ACO algorithm, the ants make their decision, regarding more than one step forward, but they include only one new element in their solutions.

We simulated the situation of risky hunting in the striped field mouse Apodemus agrarius in order to examine whether these animals are able to make a choice between small and large quantities of live prey (ants). In the first (preliminary) experiment we investigated to what extent mice were interested in ants as a live prey and how their hunting activity depended on the quantity of these edible...

Cataglyphis ants are renowned for their impressive navigation skills, which have been studied in numerous experiments during forward locomotion. However, the ants' navigational performance during backward homing when dragging large food loads has not been investigated until now. During backward locomotion, the odometer has to deal with unsteady motion and irregularities in inter-leg coordinatio...

The visually guided foraging routes of some formicine ants are individually stereotyped, suggesting the importance of visual learning in maintaining these routes. We ask here whether the wood ant Formica rufa learns a sequence of visual features encountered at different stages along a route, as reported for honeybees. We trained ants in several simple mazes to follow two alternative routes. Alo...