Animals constantly face the challenge of extracting important information out of their environment, and for many animals much of this information is chemical in nature. The ability to discriminate and generalize between chemical stimuli is extremely important and is commonly thought to depend mostly on the structural similarity between the different stimuli. However, we previously provided evid...

One of the most important micro engineers of the terrestrial ecosystems, especially in the arid areas is the harvester ants due to their activity in the soil through nest building; they can make major changes while influencing the surface and subsurface in the rangeland soil. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of harvester ants (Messor spp.) on some soil properties in Rood...

This paper studies the characteristics and behavior of AntNet routing algorithm and introduces two complementary strategies to improve its adaptability and robustness particularly under unpredicted traffic conditions such as network failure or sudden burst of network traffic. Both of the proposed strategies use the knowledge of backward ants with undesirable trip times called Dead Ants to balan...

Understanding of the organization of animal societies often requires knowledge of the identity of group members and their spatial location. We propose an original experimental design to track automatically the position of individuals using radio frequency identification technology (RFID). Ants equipped with passive transponders were detected by a reader mounted on a mobile arm moving across the...

In this paper we investigate how to extract proof procedural information contained in declarative representations of mathematical knowledge, such as axioms, definitions, lemmas and theorems (collectively called assertions) and how to effectively include it into automated proof search techniques. In the context of the proof planner Multi and the agent-based reasoning system Ω-Ants, we present te...

In this paper, we propose a new ant-based clustering algorithm called AntClust. It is inspired from the chemical recognition system of ants. In this system, the continuous interactions between the nestmates generate a “Gestalt” colonial odor. Similarly, our clustering algorithm associates an object of the data set to the odor of an ant and then simulates meetings between ants. At the end, artif...

Background: Synanthropic ants can transmit pathogens especially in hospital environments,  but this fact had not been confirmed in Palaearctic region. This is the first study on confirming this ability of ants in this region. Methods: Three hospitals of Bandar Abbas, Iran have been selected for monthly sampling of ants in their various wards. The main processe...

Kriging is an advanced geostatistical procedure that generates an estimated surface or 3D model from a scattered set of points. This method can be used for estimating resources using a grid of sampled boreholes. However, conventional ordinary kriging (OK) is unable to take locally varying anisotropy (LVA) into account. A numerical approach has been presented that generates an LVA field by calcu...

Hawaii is home to over 60 ant species, including five of the six most damaging invasive ants. Although there have been many surveys of ants in Hawaii, the last island-wide hand-collection survey of ants on Oahu was conducted in 1988-1994. In 2012, a timed hand-collection of ants was made at 44 sites in a systematic, roadside survey throughout Oahu. Ants were identified and species distribution ...

Plant extracts have been considered for the control leaf-cutting ants. The objectives of this study were to evaluate survival worker ants after topical application Ageratum conyzoides (mentrasto) and Manihot esculenta (cassava) extracts; effect hexane extract via ingestion on workers Atta sexdens Forel 1908 isolated or not from their colonies, in order verify whether symbiotic fungus Leucoagari...