The Australian intertidal ant, Polyrhachis sokolova lives in mudflat habitats and nests at the base of mangroves. They are solitary foraging ants that rely on visual cues. The ants are active during low tides at both day and night and thus experience a wide range of light intensities. We here ask the extent to which the compound eyes of P. sokolova reflect the fact that they operate during both...

Cephalotes minutus (Fabricius, 1804) Myrmicinae Sebastiani et al. 433 (HARA) Containing approximately 75 genera and 1.300 species, Malpighiaceae is one of the most diverse families of tropical and subtropical lianas and shrubs worldwide, which is predominantly distributed within the neotropics (Anderson, 2013). In Brazil, Malpighiaceae is represented by 44 genera and approximately 561 species d...

Protective ant-plant mutualisms that are exploited by non-defending parasitic ants represent prominent model systems for ecology and evolutionary biology. The mutualist Pseudomyrmex ferrugineus is an obligate plant-ant and fully depends on acacias for nesting space and food. The parasite Pseudomyrmex gracilis facultatively nests on acacias and uses host-derived food rewards but also external fo...

The metapleural gland is an organ exclusive to ants. Its main role is to produce secretions that inhibit the proliferation of different types of pathogens. The aim of the present study was to examine the morphophysiological differences between the metapleural gland of 3 non-fungus-growing ants of the tribes Ectatommini, Myrmicini, and Blepharidattini and that of 5 fungus-growing ants from 2 bas...

We explore the artificial life domain which opens new horizons to find bio-inspired solutions to image processing problems. Besides the ants which were successfully used, we investigate a new approach based on the interaction of social spiders, where we adapt the collective web weaving to an image segmentation on regions. Spiders were successfully used to extract regions on grey level images. W...

Biotic interactions are often important in the establishment and spread of invasive species. In particular, competition between introduced and native species can strongly influence the distribution and spread of exotic species and in some cases competition among introduced species can be important. The Caribbean crazy ant, Nylanderia fulva, was recently introduced to the Gulf Coast of Texas, an...

One of the most important extensions of the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery (VRPSPD) where customers require simultaneous delivery and pick-up service. In this paper, we propose an effective ant colony optimization (EACO) which includes insert, swap and 2-Opt moves for solving VRPSPD that is different with common an...

Lord Howe Island is an eroded remnant of a shield volcano approximately 600 km northeast of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It has fascinated biologists for more than a century because of its unique and iconic fauna and flora, and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1982. Although the terrestrial invertebrate fauna is reasonably well known for many groups, most Hymenoptera, apart from ant...

The behaviour of the Australian bulldog ant Myrmecia nigriceps (FT. Smith) has been studied by using moving targets characterized by sizedistance equivalence in relation to a stationary zero-point. The attack behaviour of freely moving animals demonstrated that the ants can discriminate between different targets, in the range of 5-80 cm, using movement parallax to extract information about the ...