Symbiotic relations are present in the nature and can contribute to success of organisms involved. Endophytic fungi live within leaf tissues without causing any harm host plant, some them be a defense mechanism against attack by leaf-cutting ants. Ants genus Atta known as ants have an obligatory association with fungus Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, cutting pieces leaves bringing back colony fung...

Ants that fall prey to the raids of army ants commonly respond by evacuating their nests. This documented behavior has been underexploited by researchers as an efficient research tool. This study focuses on the evacuation response of the southwestern desert ant Aphaenogaster cockerelli André (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) to the army ant Newamyrmex nigrescens Cresson. It is shown that army ants can ...

Two new myrmecophilous species of the supertribes Clavigeritae and Batrisitae are described from Yunnan, Southwest China: Diartiger jiquanyui sp. nov. associated with Lasius Fabricius ants, Myrmicophila yulong Myrmica Latreille ants. Both compared separated related congeners, images their habitus major diagnostic features provided.

Ants are so low to the ground that slight undulations in the terrain over which they navigate will cause large and unpredictable changes to their view of the scene around them. We describe here evidence of a form of motor learning that helps ants follow their usual route when guiding landmarks vanish from sight. Wood ants were trained to approach a vertical bar presented at varying positions on...

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms often suffer from criticism for the local optimum and premature convergence. In order to overcome these inherent shortcomings shared by most ACO algorithms, we divide the ordinary ants into two types: the utilizationoriented ants and the exploration-oriented ants. The utilization-oriented ants focus on constructing solutions based on the learned experien...

Vochysia elliptica (Vochysiaceae) is a shrubby plant, which does not have EFNs. Camponotus ants thieve nectar, and can decrease plant fitness by making flowers less attractive to pollinators. However, ants remove herbivores, wHich can be beneficial. Results show that plants from which ants were excluded had lower rates of termite (simulated herbivore) removal than did plants visited by ants. Pl...

In contrast to floating on the surface of distilled water, ants were immediately submerged after being placed in the potassium oleate (PO) water solution, which led to immobilization within minutes. However, some workers survived after being immersed in 0.03% PO water solution at 25◦C for up to 640 min. Elevated temperature of the PO water solution is needed to kill ants within a shorter time f...

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 how visual information can drive navigation via procedural rather than map-like instructions. Two recent behavioural observations high...

INTRODUCTION Patient safety depends on excellent practice of anaesthetists' non-technical skills (ANTS). The ANTS framework has been validated in developed countries but there is no literature on the practice of ANTS in low-income countries. This study examines ANTS in this unexplored context. METHODS This qualitative ethnographic study used observations of Rwandan anaesthesia providers and i...

The metabolic cost of the negotiation of obstacles, and the influence that this has on route selection, are important determinants of an animal's locomotor behaviour. We determined the gross metabolic cost of locomotion on slopes of different gradients, ranging from -90 to +90 deg, in leaf-cutter ants (Acromyrmex octospinosus) in a closed-circuit respirometry system. Ants were able to select th...