Fast food in ant communities: how competing species find resources |
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Authors: | Pearce-Duvet Jessica M C Moyano Martin Adler Frederick R Feener Donald H |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Biology, University of Utah, 257 South 1400 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA;(2) Present address: Estaci?n Biol?gica de Do?ana, CSIC, c/Americo Vespucio s/n, 41092 Sevilla, Spain |
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Abstract: | An understanding of foraging behavior is crucial to understanding higher level community dynamics; in particular, there is
a lack of information about how different species discover food resources. We examined the effect of forager number and forager
discovery capacity on food discovery in two disparate temperate ant communities, located in Texas and Arizona. We defined
forager discovery capacity as the per capita rate of resource discovery, or how quickly individual ants arrived at resources.
In general, resources were discovered more quickly when more foragers were present; this was true both within communities,
where species identity was ignored, as well as within species. This pattern suggests that resource discovery is a matter of
random processes, with ants essentially bumping into resources at a rate mediated by their abundance. In contrast, species
that were better discoverers, as defined by the proportion of resources discovered first, did not have higher numbers of mean
foragers. Instead, both mean forager number and mean forager discovery capacity determined discovery success. The Texas species
used both forager number and capacity, whereas the Arizona species used only forager capacity. There was a negative correlation
between a species’ prevalence in the environment and the discovery capacity of its foragers, suggesting that a given species
cannot exploit both high numbers and high discovery capacity as a strategy. These results highlight that while forager number
is crucial to determining time to discovery at the community level and within species, individual forager characteristics
influence the outcome of exploitative competition in ant communities. |
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