Among ants, plesiobiotic associations are defined as occasional or regular nesting of heterospecific colonies in close proximity and without any biological interdependence. Habitats with a scarcity available microhabitats ecological dissimilarity between the involved species supposed to favor frequency plesiobiosis. In last review published on this topic, authors summarized all pairs reported l...

This paper conducts experimental tests to study the stagnation behavior the Interacted Multiple Ant Colonies Optimization (IMACO) framework. The idea of different ant colonies use different types of problem dependent heuristics has been proposed as well. The performance of IMACO was demonstrated by comparing it with the Ant Colony System (ACS) the best performing ant algorithm. The computationa...

In this paper, we report on the use of ant systems in the data mining field capable of extracting comprehensible classifiers from data. The ant system used is a MAX -MIN ant system which differs from the originally proposed ant systems in its ability to explore bigger parts of the solution space, yielding better performing rules. Furthermore, we are able to include intervals in the rules result...

In this paper we analyze the application of the Ant Colony Optimization to the Minimum Weight Vertex Covering Problem. We use the software system that we developed and implemented different standard ACO algorithms to this problem: Ant Colony System, the use of Elitism, Rank based approach and the MinMax system. We have made a comparative assessment of the effectiveness of these algorithms to th...

Ant algorithms [18, 14, 19] are a recently developed, population-based approach which has been successfully applied to several NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems [6, 13, 17, 23, 34, 40, 49]. As the name suggests, ant algorithms have been inspired by the behavior of real ant colonies, in particular, by their foraging behavior. One of the main ideas of ant algorithms is the indirect comm...

1. Habitat fragmentation, anthropogenic disturbance and the introduction of invasive species are factors thought to structure ant assemblages. To understand responses of the ant community to changes in the environment, ants are commonly categorised into functional groups, a scheme developed and based on Australian ants. 2. Behaviourally dominant and aggressive ants of the dominant dolichoderina...

In this paper we introduce Ant-Q, a family of algorithms which present many similarities with Q-learning (Watkins, 1989), and which we apply to the solution of symmetric and asymmetric instances of the traveling salesman problem (TSP). Ant-Q algorithms were inspired by work on the ant system (AS), a distributed algorithm for combinatorial optimization based on the metaphor of ant colonies which...

The discovery of the striking positional conservation between the Antennapedia and Bithorax homeotic gene complexes (ANT-C and BX-C) in Drosophila melanogaster and the murine Hox and human HOX clusters has had a substantial impact on our understanding of the evolution of development and its genetic regulation. Structural differences do exist among the mammalian Hox complexes and the ANT-C in D....

Symbioses include some of the clearest cases of coevolution, but their origin, loss or reassembly with different partners can rarely be inferred. Here we use ant/plant symbioses involving three plant clades to investigate the evolution of symbioses. We generated phylogenies for the big-eyed arboreal ants (Pseudomyrmecinae), including 72% of their 286 species, as well as for five of their plant ...

Host-associated organisms (e.g., parasites, commensals, and mutualists) may rely on their hosts for only a portion of their life cycle. The life-history traits and physiology of hosts are well-known determinants of the biodiversity of their associated organisms. The environmental context may strongly influence this interaction, but the relative roles of host traits and the environment are poorl...