Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
An ant colony is a population of ants, typically from a single species, capable of maintaining their complete lifecycle. Ant colonies are eusocial, communal, and efficiently organized and are very much like those found in other social Hymenoptera, though the various groups of these developed sociality independently through convergent evolution. [1]
In ants, social conflicts, sex conflicts, or caste conflicts can exist. These conflicts occur within the same colony or supercolony at various levels: on an individual scale, between two or more specific ants; on the scale of sex, between males and females; or on the scale of different castes, between queens and workers.
The drones leave the colony on a nuptial flight or mating flight, find a virgin queen to reproduce with, and then die shortly after. [5] Colony of bees in a nest. Bee and wasp social structure is very similar to that of ants, except all of the members have wings. Both bees and ants communicate effectively using pheromone methods.
Myrmecophytes, or ant plants, live in a mutualistic association with a colony of ants. These plants possess structural adaptations that provide ants with food and/or shelter. Myrmecodia are also classified as epiphytes. The term epiphytic derives from the Greek epi-(meaning 'upon') and phyton (meaning 'plant'). Epiphytic plants are sometimes ...
Most ant species will send individual scouts to find food sources and later recruit others from the colony to help; however, army ants dispatch a cooperative, leaderless group of foragers to detect and overwhelm the prey at once. [3] [5] Army ants do not have a permanent nest but instead form many bivouacs as they travel.
Task allocation and partitioning is the way that tasks are chosen, assigned, subdivided, and coordinated within a colony of social insects. Task allocation and partitioning gives rise to the division of labor often observed in social insect colonies, whereby individuals specialize on different tasks within the colony (e.g., "foragers", "nurses").
Because of this, ants are a popular source of inspiration for design in software engineering, robotics, industrial design, and other fields involving many simple parts working together to perform complex tasks. [2] The most popular current model of self-organization in ants and other social insects is the response threshold model.
D. laevigatus colonies are fairly small for army ant colonies, ranging from 30,000 to 1,000,000 individuals. Because the colonies prefer long-term food exploitation and stable column foraging systems to massive raids, there is little pressure for the colonies to expand and support the massive numbers of individuals common in surface-hunting ...