We investigated how forest ant communities differ between edge and interior locations within a north temperate deciduous forest in Vermont, U.S.A. to address the question: Would ants be a suitable indicator taxon for monitoring the impacts of fragmentation upon forests?  Furthermore, for edge and interior forest habitats, we compared colony demography and social structure of Aphaenogaster rudis, the ecologically dominant ant species in this forest.  We found very similar ant communities in edge and interior forest habitats that we censused using pitfall traps and litter plot excavation over the course of two summers, 2003 and 2004; rarefaction analysis via simulation revealed no difference between the edge and interior ant species rarefaction curves.  However, for the 25 A. rudis nests we collected during litter plot excavations, we found a significant difference in queen state depending upon whether nests were from edge or interior plots.  Aggression tests conducted with A. rudis in the field and in the laboratory showed little fighting among workers from separate nests throughout forest plots from both the interior and edge habitats.  These results lead us to propose that A. rudis social structure in this forest may not consist of the single queen, rigidly-bounded colony structure previously described for other locations.  Since A. rudis is the ecologically dominant ant species in this forest, if edge effects cause a change in social structure in A. rudis populations, there are significant implications for the invertebrate community and forest ecosystem.