-Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN’s) have become an important and challenging research area in last year. Wireless Sensor Networks consisting of nodes with limited power are deployed to gather useful information from the field. In WSNs it is critical to collect the information in an energy efficient manner. Ant Colony Optimization, a swarm intelligence based optimization technique, is widely used ...

The red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta Buren, is considered an oil-loving feeder, however, carbohydrates are essential ingredients in the diet of the fire ant also. Comprehensive screening of mono-, di-, and tri-saccharides demonstrated that glucose, fructose, fucose, sucrose, maltose, turanose and raffinose were significant phagostimulants for fire ant workers. It was also found that wh...

Invasive species pose serious threats to community structure and ecosystem function worldwide. The impacts of invasive species can be more pervasive than simple reduction of species numbers. By using 7 years of data in a biological preserve in northern California, we documented the disassembly of native ant communities during an invasion by the Argentine ant. In sites without the Argentine ant,...

Ant-Q is an algorithm belonging to the class of ant colony based methods, that is, of combinatorial optimization methods in which a set of simple agents, called ants, cooperate to find good solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. The main focus of this article is on the experimental study of the sensitivity of the Ant-Q algorithm to its parameters and on the investigation of synergist...

Swarm intelligence is a collective effort of simple agents working locally but resulting in wonderful patterns. Labor division, decentralized control, stigmergy and self organization are the major components of swarm intelligence. Ant based clustering is inspired by brood sorting in ant colonies, an example of decentralized and self organized work. Stigmergy in ant colonies is via a chemical ph...

| Ant System is a general purpose algorithm inspired by the study of the behavior of Ant Colonies. It is based on a cooperative search paradigm that is applicable to the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper we introduce MAX{MIN Ant System, an improved version of basic Ant System, and report our results for its application to symmetric and asymmetric instances of the we...

We demonstrated that mitochondrial phospholipid hydroperoxide glutathione peroxidase (PHGPx) first suppressed the dissociation of cytochrome c (cyt c) from cardiolipin (CL) in mitochondrial inner membranes and then apoptosis caused by the hypoglycaemia by the prevention of peroxidation of CL [Nomura, Imai, Koumura, Arai and Nakagawa (1999) J. Biol. Chem. 274, 29294-29302; Nomura, Imai, Koumura,...

Mound-building ants, and especially wood ants (Formica rufa group), are wide-spread key species that affect ecosystem functioning in several ways in the boreal forests of Eurasia. Forest clear-cutting harms wood ants, but the colonies gradually recover and multiply as forest succession proceeds. Thus their impact on ecosystem functioning may change with stand age. The objectives of this thesis ...