Stephanie Heater, sheater@bgnet.bgsu.edu, Bowling Green State University, Dept. of Biological Sciences, Bowling Green, OH and Jerry L. Cook, bio_jlc@shsu.edu, Sam Houston State University, Department of Biological Sciences, Box 2116, Huntsville, TX.
We conducted an experiment to determine how a liquid food is transferred between members of a colony of Linepithema humile. Given a limited food source, not all ants within a colony will be supplied with a portion of that food. Therefore, we tried to determine how many ants would share in food collected by a small number of successful foragers. We experimentally observed the results of an individual worker and small numbers of worker acquiring food and returning to the colony to distribute that food. We report our results as number of workers obtaining food from a known food acquisition; and quantitatively, how much food is distributed to individual colony members during food transfer.
Species 1: Hymenoptera Formicidae
Linepithema humile (Argentine ant)
Keywords: food transfer, foraging
