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 navigation to landmark-guided navigation compared with the North African desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, which usually inhabits a visually bare habitat. Here...

Following its introduction from Asia to the USA, the Asian needle ant (Pachycondyla chinensis) is rapidly spreading into a wide range of habitats with great negative ecological affects. In addition, the species is a concern for human health because of its powerful, sometimes deadly, sting. Here, we assessed the potential of P. chinensis to spread further and to invade entirely new regions. We u...

Theory predicts that altruism is only evolutionarily stable if it is preferentially directed towards relatives, so that any such behaviour towards seemingly unrelated individuals requires scrutiny. Queenless army ant colonies, which have anecdotally been reported to fuse with queenright foreign colonies, are such an enigmatic case. Here we combine experimental queen removal with population gene...

Six mango, Mangifera indica L., plantations around Parakou, northern Benin, were sampled at 2-wk intervals for fruit fly damage from early April to late May in 2005. Mean damage ranged from 1 to 24% with a weaver ant, Oecophylla longinoda (Latreille), being either abundant or absent. The fruit fly complex is made up of Ceratitis spp. and Bactrocera invadens Drew et al., a new invasive species i...

With the advent of Agent Technology, and challenges facing the health care sector as a result of scarcity of both medical personnel and resources and also the distributive and complex nature of the activities in the medical domain, there is need to use the new programming paradigm in order to come up with robust and reliable system that will solve problems bedeviling the health care sector espe...

Habitat complexity is a major determinant of structure and diversity of ant assemblages. Following the size-grain hypothesis, smaller ant species are likely to be advantaged in more complex habitats compared to larger species. Habitat complexity can act as an environmental filter based on species size and morphological traits, therefore affecting the overall structure and diversity of ant assem...

The African termiteraiding ant Pachycondyla analis Latreille (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) organizes group raids on termites of the subfamily Macrotermitinae. Termites and ants occupy and share similar habitats, resulting in a co-evolutionary arms race between termites as prey and ants as predators. The present study explored whether P. analis uses semio- chemical signaling cues to detect potential...

DNA barcoding and metabarcoding methods have been invaluable in the study of interactions between host organisms and their symbiotic communities. Barcodes can help identify individual symbionts that are difficult to distinguish using morphological characters, and provide a way to classify undescribed species. Entire symbiont communities can be characterized rapidly using barcoding and especiall...