...Andrew T. Burchill; Theodore P. Pavlic; Stephen C. Pratt; Chris R. Reid ABSTRACT The collective transport of massive food items by ant teams is a striking example of biological cooperation, but it remains unclear how these decentralized teams coordinate to overcome the various challenges associated...

...Jason P. Andras; Karen L. Hollis; Kristyn A. Carter; Genevieve Couldwell; Elise Nowbahari ABSTRACT In colonies of Cataglyphis cursor ants, a single queen mates with multiple males, creating the foundation for heritable behavioral specializations. A novel and unique candidate...

...Hugo Merienne; Gérard Latil; Pierre Moretto; Vincent Fourcassié ABSTRACT Ants are famous in the animal kingdom for their amazing load-carrying performance. Yet, the mechanisms that allow these insects to maintain their stability when carrying heavy loads have been poorly investigated. Here, we...

...Trevor Murray; Zoltán Kócsi; Hansjürgen Dahmen; Ajay Narendra; Florent Le Möel; Antoine Wystrach; Jochen Zeil ABSTRACT Solitary foraging ants rely on vision when travelling along routes and when pinpointing their nest. We tethered foragers of Myrmecia croslandi on a trackball and recorded...

... attention, but their physical properties were little studied. We argue that these properties determine their biological functionality, and are vital to understanding how CHC composition affects their adaptive value. We investigated melting behaviour and viscosity of CHCs from 11 ant species using...

... integration, vector memory and view memory, but what is the evidence that these geometric capabilities form an integrated map? Ants Bees Navigation Path integration Vector View Are the internal mechanisms supporting biological navigation ‘map-like’ representations? Could animal brains...

...Piyankarie Jayatilaka; Trevor Murray; Ajay Narendra; Jochen Zeil ABSTRACT We provide a detailed analysis of the learning walks performed by Myrmecia croslandi ants at the nest during which they acquire visual information on its location . Most learning walks of 12 individually marked naïve ants...

...Cody A. Freas; Ajay Narendra; Ken Cheng ABSTRACT Ants use both terrestrial landmarks and celestial cues to navigate to and from their nest location. These cues persist even as light levels drop during the twilight/night. Here, we determined the compass cues used by a nocturnal bull ant, Myrmecia...

...Chloé A. Raderschall; Ajay Narendra; Jochen Zeil ABSTRACT Ant foragers are known to memorise visual scenes that allow them to repeatedly travel along idiosyncratic routes and to return to specific places. Guidance is provided by a comparison between visual memories and current views, which...

...Audrey Dussutour; Laure-Anne Poissonnier; Jerome Buhl; Stephen J. Simpson ABSTRACT In ants, nutrient acquisition for the whole colony relies on a minority of workers, the foragers, which are often old and lean. Some studies have shown that the link between age, physiology and foraging activity...

...Tomer J. Czaczkes; Anete K. Salmane; Felicia A. M. Klampfleuthner; Jürgen Heinze ABSTRACT Ant colonies are famous for using trail pheromones to make collective decisions. Trail pheromone systems are characterised by positive feedback, which results in rapid collective decision making. However...

... regularities in their environment and make predictions, for instance about distribution of food resources. We studied perceptual similarity of different plant odours by conditioning individual carpenter ants to one odour, and subsequently testing their response to another, structurally different odour. We...

... temperature-dependent effects on foraging and the occupation of temporal niches. By studying two congeneric, sympatric Myrmecia ants we isolated the effect of temperature and investigated whether temperature affects foraging schedules and causes the two ants to be active at distinct times of the day or year...

...Vincent Fourcassié; Audrey Dussutour; Jean-Louis Deneubourg Summary Many animals take part in flow-like collective movements. In most species, however, the flow is unidirectional. Ants are one of the rare group of organisms in which flow-like movements are predominantly bidirectional. This adds...

...A. Dussutour; S. C. Nicolis; G. Shephard; M. Beekman; D. J. T. Sumpter SUMMARY In this paper we investigate the foraging activity of an invasive ant species, the big headed ant Pheidole megacephala . We establish that the ants' behavior is consistent with the use of two different pheromone signals...

...Doreen Heß; Julja Koch; Bernhard Ronacher SUMMARY On their foraging excursions, desert ants ( Cataglyphis fortis )navigate by means of path integration, exhibiting high precision even in undulating terrain. To avoid errors in their home vector the ants must measure the slopes of ascents...

...A. Dussutour; S. J. Simpson SUMMARY Ants and all social insects are faced with a nutritional challenge: the food entering the colony is brought by only a small number of its workers but is shared among all members of the colony. In this study, we investigated how ants maintain carbohydrates supply...

...Fernando J. Guerrieri; Patrizia d'Ettorre SUMMARY Social insects have evolved efficient recognition systems guaranteeing social cohesion and protection from enemies. To defend their territories and threaten non-nestmate intruders, ants open their mandibles as a first aggressive display. Albeit...

...Ajay Narendra SUMMARY Individually foraging ants are known to return to their nest by using path-integration and recording visual information present in the environment. The interaction between the path integrator and the information provided by the visual cues in an Australian desert ant...

...Audrey Dussutour; Jean-Louis Deneubourg; Vincent Fourcassié SUMMARY Foraging in ants is generally organized along well-defined trails supporting a bi-directional flow of outbound and nestbound individuals and one can hypothesize that this flow is maximized to ensure a high rate of food return...