In this investigation, detection dogs are trained and used in identifying red imported fire ants, Solenopsis invicta Buren, and their nests. The methodology could assist in reducing the frequency and scope of chemical treatments for red imported fire ant management and thus reduce labor costs and chemical use as well as improve control and quarantine efficiency. Three dogs previously trained fo...

Non-pollinating consumers of floral resources, especially ants, can disrupt pollination and plant reproductive processes. As an alternative food resource to flowers, extrafloral nectar (EFN) may distract and satiate ants from flowers, thereby reducing their antagonistic effects on plants. Yet, EFN may actually attract and increase ant density on plants, thus increasing the disruption of pollina...

Urbanization can alter the organization of ant communities and affect populations of urban pest ants. In this study, we sampled ant communities in urban and suburban yards to understand the habitat factors that shape these communities and influence the abundance of a common pest species, Tapinoma sessile (Say). We used pitfall traps to sample ant communities and a combination of pitfall traps ...

The stress configuration and tectonic analysis of the Pan – African orogeny is drawn from the Igarra schist belt, southwestern Nigeria. The analysis of conjugate shear fractures of the schist belt indicates that two distinct compressive events (NE – SW and E – W) occurred in this Pan – African mobile zone. The palaeostress systems reveal a clockwise rotation of compressional axis from D1 (NE – ...

objective: to evaluate the possible interaction between religious beliefs and psychiatric disorders among black americans. methods: in this study, we used data of 5181 adult black americans who had participated in national survey of american life (nsal) from february 2001 to june 2003. variables such as socio-demographics, religious beliefs, and psychiatric disorders were entered in a cox regre...

OBJECTIVE Recently, much research has been proposed using nature inspired algorithms to perform complex machine learning tasks. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is one such algorithm based on swarm intelligence and is derived from a model inspired by the collective foraging behavior of ants. Taking advantage of the ACO in traits such as self-organization and robustness, this paper investigates ant...

Parasitism of ants that nest in rotting wood by eucharitid wasps was studied in order to examine whether habitat and season influence ant parasitism, vegetation complexity and agrochemical use correlate with ant parasitism, and whether specific local and landscape features of agricultural landscapes correlate with changes in ant parasitism. In a coffee landscape, 30 coffee and 10 forest sites w...

Software needs modifications and requires revisions regularly. Owing to these revisions, retesting software becomes essential ensure that the enhancements made, have not affected its bug-free functioning. The time cost incurred in this process, need be reduced by method of test case selection prioritization. It is observed many nature-inspired techniques are applied area. African Buffalo Optimi...

This paper presents an application of the ant colony metaphor for continuous space optimization problems. The ant algortihm proposed works following the principle of the ant colony approach, i.e., a population of agents iteratively, cooperatively, and independently search for a solution. Each ant in the distributed algorithm applies a local search operator which explores the neighborhood region...