.... ( 1983 ). Nestmate and kin recognition in interspecific mixed colonies of ants . Science 222 , 1027 - 1029 . 10.1126/science.222.4627.1027 Chai , P. C. , Cruchet , S. , Wigger , L. and Benton , R. ( 2019 ). Sensory neuron lineage mapping and manipulation in the Drosophila...

... in social insects and considers the relationship between colony size and behavioural flexibility. Ant Group size Task specialisation Ontogeny Plasticity Across biological scales, variability in phenotypic traits has long been considered as noise, but it is now recognised as beneficial...

...Dihego Oliveira Azevedo; Sérgio Oliveira de Paula; José Cola Zanuncio; Luis Carlos Martinez; José Eduardo Serrão ABSTRACT In the ant Ectatomma tuberculatum (Olivier 1792), workers have active ovaries and lay trophic eggs that are eaten by the queen and larvae. Vitellogenins are the main proteins...

...Paul Graham; Michael Mangan ABSTRACT Visual navigation is a critical behaviour for many animals, and it has been particularly well studied in ants. Decades of ant navigation research have uncovered many ways in which efficient navigation can be implemented in small brains. For example, ants show us...

...Antoine Wystrach; Michael Mangan; Andrew Philippides; Paul Graham SUMMARY Ants can use visual information to guide long idiosyncratic routes and accurately pinpoint locations in complex natural environments. It has often been assumed that the world knowledge of these foragers consists of multiple...

...Ken Cheng; Eliza J. T. Middleton; Rüdiger Wehner SUMMARY The central Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti lives in a visually cluttered semi-arid habitat dotted with grass tussocks, bushes and trees. Previously, it was shown that this species has a higher propensity to switch from vector-based...

..., ranging from –90 to +90 deg, in leaf-cutter ants ( Acromyrmex octospinosus ) in a closed-circuit respirometry system. Ants were able to select their preferred speed for each gradient. The gross metabolic energy expenditure per unit distance travelled on the slope ( C path ) was calculated from the rate...

...Karin Moll; Walter Federle; Flavio Roces SUMMARY Grass-cutting ants ( Atta vollenweideri ) carry fragments that can be many times heavier and longer than the ants themselves and it is important for them to avoid falling over during load transport. To investigate whether the energetic costs...

...Fernando J. Guerrieri; Patrizia d'Ettorre; Jean-Marc Devaud; Martin Giurfa SUMMARY Ants exhibit impressive olfactory learning abilities. Operant protocols in which ants freely choose between rewarded and non-rewarded odours have been used to characterise associative olfactory learning and memory...

... distance estimate. This is in striking agreement with findings in desert ants ( Ronacher et al., 2006 ; Sommer and Wehner, 2005 ). As strictly individual foragers, these animals may not exhibit a community odometer. The personal odometer, however, feeds into distance estimation, and thus path integration...

... demonstrate navigational functions of the ocelli in the visually guided Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti . These ants are known to rely on both visual landmark learning and path integration. We conducted experiments to reveal the role of ocelli in the perception and use of celestial compass information...

... that night-active bull ants attend to both the pattern of polarised skylight and the landmark panorama in their familiar habitat. When the two directional cues are in conflict, ants choose a compromise direction. However, landmark guidance appears to be the primary mechanism of navigation used by forager...

... of individuals using radio frequency identification technology (RFID). Ants equipped with passive transponders were detected by a reader mounted on a mobile arm moving across the nest surface. We developed an algorithm to accurately extract the positions of individuals moving in two dimensions. Our method...

...Yael Provecho; Roxana Josens SUMMARY Camponotus mus ants can associate sucrose and odour at the source during successive foraging cycles and use this memory to locate the nectar in the absence of other cues. These ants perform conspicuous trophallactic behaviour during recruitment while foraging...

...Roxana Josens; Claire Eschbach; Martin Giurfa SUMMARY Individual Camponotus fellah ants perceive and learn odours in a Y-maze in which one odour is paired with sugar (CS+) while a different odour(CS–) is paired with quinine (differential conditioning). We studied olfactory retention in C. fellah...

...Ajay Narendra; Ken Cheng; Rüdiger Wehner SUMMARY Estimation of distance travelled (odometry) forms a vital part of navigation for solitarily foraging ants. In this study we investigated the properties of odometric memory in the Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti . Ants were trained to travel...

...Anne-Catherine Mailleux; Claire Detrain; Jean-Louis Deneubourg SUMMARY The decision for an ant forager to launch recruitment is governed by an internal response threshold. Here, we demonstrate that this threshold (the desired volume) triggering trail-laying increases under starvation...

..., yellow, green, blue,black, gray, dark gray and white sheets) affected the directed aerial descent of worker Cephalotes atratus (L.) ants. Across the visual spectrum,tree trunk reflectance was 2–10 times higher than the surrounding foliage and differed among trees. In two separate experiments, one...

...Gunnar Grah; Rüdiger Wehner; Bernhard Ronacher SUMMARY In this study, we investigate the ability of desert ants to gauge the ground distances of sloped sections in a three-dimensional (3D) outbound path. Ground distance estimation, as opposed to a simple measurement of walking distances...

...Alexandra Lipp; Harald Wolf; Fritz-Olaf Lehmann SUMMARY To assess energetic costs during rest and locomotion in a small insect, we measured metabolic rate in freely moving ants Camponotus sp . (average body mass 11.9 mg). The animals ran in a straight respirometric chamber in which locomotor speed...