Cultivation of fungi for food by fungus-growing ants (Attini: Formicidae) originated about 50 million years ago. The subsequent evolutionary history of this agricultural symbiosis was inferred from phylogenetic and population-genetic patterns of 553 cultivars isolated from gardens of "primitive" fungus-growing ants. These patterns indicate that fungus-growing ants succeeded at domesticating mul...

During a recent investigation of ant-mimicking arthropods in Costa Rica, two new species salticid spiders were discovered. Here, I provide descriptions the species, Myrmapana costaricaensis sp. nov. and Corcovetella galianoae The former has forms; dark form resembles Neoponera ants, while light Pseudomyrmex ants. Camponotus

In this paper is introduce "flying" ants in Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). In traditional ACO algorithms the ants construct their solution regarding one step forward. In proposed ACO algorithm, the ants make their decision, regarding more than one step forward, but they include only one new element in their solutions.

We simulated the situation of risky hunting in the striped field mouse Apodemus agrarius in order to examine whether these animals are able to make a choice between small and large quantities of live prey (ants). In the first (preliminary) experiment we investigated to what extent mice were interested in ants as a live prey and how their hunting activity depended on the quantity of these edible...

Cataglyphis ants are renowned for their impressive navigation skills, which have been studied in numerous experiments during forward locomotion. However, the ants' navigational performance during backward homing when dragging large food loads has not been investigated until now. During backward locomotion, the odometer has to deal with unsteady motion and irregularities in inter-leg coordinatio...

The visually guided foraging routes of some formicine ants are individually stereotyped, suggesting the importance of visual learning in maintaining these routes. We ask here whether the wood ant Formica rufa learns a sequence of visual features encountered at different stages along a route, as reported for honeybees. We trained ants in several simple mazes to follow two alternative routes. Alo...

I used a host-visitor modeling framework to examine the interaction between the treehopper Publilia conca6a and ants in the genus Formica. In particular, I tested the functional relationship between ant tending, the spatial distribution of treehoppers, and treehopper density. The per-capita density of ants at each host plant was a decreasing function of treehopper density, distance from the ant...

We have studied the changing use of spatial memories in wood ants by charting how the ants' paths transform when ants are first trained to feed at one site and must then switch to another site. Because ants, which are trained to approach a single feeding site from a single starting point, are attracted directly to that goal when started from unfamiliar positions, we describe the ants' paths in ...