How do ants find new places to build colonies?

Introduction

Ants exhibit diverse strategies for finding new places to build colonies, influenced by factors such as competition, predation, and environmental conditions. Understanding these strategies provides insights into their survival and ecological success.

Key Insights

Intraspecific Competition and Resource Allocation:
- Ant colonies often exhibit overdispersed patterns, suggesting strong intraspecific competition for resources. This competition influences nest spacing and foraging behavior, with colonies avoiding foraging towards each other to minimize conflict .
Microhabitat Selection:
- Foundress queens do not show a strong preference for specific microhabitats or avoidance of conspecifics when establishing new colonies. This indicates that microhabitat selection is not a primary factor in colony founding.
Predation and Colony Spacing:
- Predation, particularly by spiders, does not significantly influence the spacing of ant colonies. Colonies with closer neighbors do not experience higher predation risks or worker mortality compared to those spaced further apart.
Dependent and Independent Colony Founding:
- Fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) exhibit both independent and dependent colony founding. In the fall, overwintered queens engage in intraspecific social parasitism by entering orphaned colonies to exploit their worker force, a strategy not seen in summer.
Environmental Influence on Colony Distribution:
- The distribution of ant colonies varies with elevation and vegetation density. At lower elevations, colonies are uniformly spaced, while at higher elevations, they are more aggregated due to limited suitable areas for establishment. This aggregation is linked to increased vegetation density, which restricts colony establishment to unshaded areas.

Conclusion

Ants employ a variety of strategies to find new places to build colonies, primarily driven by intraspecific competition and environmental conditions. While predation and microhabitat selection play lesser roles, the mode of colony founding can vary seasonally, as seen in fire ants. Overall, the spatial distribution of ant colonies is a complex interplay of competition, resource availability, and environmental constraints.

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How do ants find new places to build colonies?

Summary

Introduction

Key Insights

Conclusion

Sources and full results

Overdispersion of ant colonies: a test of hypotheses

Intraspecific overdispersion of ant colonies in the Colorado Desert is likely due to resource competition and possibly queen predation by established colonies.

A newly-discovered mode of colony founding among fire ants

Overwintered fire ant queens can start new colonies through intraspecific social parasitism in unrelated, mature, orphaned colonies, reducing the host colony's reproductive success.

PARTITIONING OF SPACE IN COMMUNITIES OF ANTS

Ants in the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts tend to overdispersed nest distribution due to defense and intraspecific competition for food, with nest spacing varying at different elevations and foraging area size decreasing with elevation and latitude.

Exploration versus exploitation in polydomous ant colonies.

Polydomy in ant colonies can increase foraging efficiency in dispersed food environments, but recruitment success can be limited by decentralization.

Ant colony optimization

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a successful swarm intelligence technique that uses pheromones to guide other ants towards a favorable path, with applications in various fields.

Ant Colony Optimization

The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm effectively solves various discrete optimization problems by mimicking real ants' shortest-path finding abilities and using pheromone trails for communication.

Recruitment Strategies and Colony Size in Ants

Ant colonies of a certain size should use only one recruitment method, as failure rates in recruitment vary based on colony size, highlighting the importance of recruitment organization in ant ecology.

Ant Colonies Prefer Infected over Uninfected Nest Sites

Pharaoh ant colonies prefer infected nests during colony relocation, potentially as an adaptive strategy to "immunize" the colony against future exposure to the same pathogenic fungus.

Ant colony optimization

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a successful swarm intelligence technique that uses pheromones to guide other ants towards a favorable path, with numerous successful applications.

Mechanisms of dispersed central-place foraging in polydomous colonies of the Argentine ant

Polydomous colonies of Argentine ants can increase foraging efficiency and competitive ability by distributing resources among multiple nests and forming recruitment trails.

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