Individual choice of building material for nest construction by worker ants and the collective outcome for their colony
Section snippets
Methods
The experiments involved 29 T. albipennis colonies. In five of them, workers were individually marked. These were the treatment colonies. The remaining 24 colonies served as controls. The control and treatment colonies were collected from Dorset, England in June and October 2005, respectively, and each had a single queen.
We marked the workers from the treatment colonies with individual paint marks as described in Sendova-Franks & Franks (1993). The median number of workers was 130 with a
Results
In accordance with earlier colony-level analysis (Aleksiev et al. 2007), the average number of grains collected by all individual foragers from each colony during the observation period changed with increasing distance of the grain pile from the nest (two-way ANOVA: distance: F2,8 = 32.84, P < 0.0001). On average, individuals collected significantly more grains at 3 cm compared with either 40 or 80 cm (Tukey test: mean difference between 40 and 3 cm: T = −6.402, P = 0.0005; mean difference between 80 and 3
Discussion
Colonies showed partial preferences for large and small sand grains at all three foraging distances, but with an increasing bias towards big grains at larger foraging distances (Fig. 4). This is consistent with our findings in an earlier study (Aleksiev et al. 2007). This pattern is also clear in the data from individual foragers (Figure 2, Figure 3). Both figures represent all the data from individually marked foragers that were directly observed to retrieve at least 20 grains. For this
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge an Overseas (Postgraduate) Research Studentship for ASA at the University of Bristol.
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A. B. Sendova-Franks is at the School of Mathematical Sciences, CEMS, University of the West of England, Bristol, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY, U.K.