COMPORTAMENTO DE FORRAGEIO DE Odontomachus haematodus
EM AMBIENTE LABORATORIAL (HYMENOPTERA: FORMICIDAE)
Ant; food preference; foraging; recruitment.
Ants, who are amongst eusocial insects, are notorious for their task allocation. One of
those activities is foraging, which consists in exploration of the surroundings of the nest,
hunting or gathering of food items and transport of this resource back to the nest to share it
with nest mates. This activity can occur in many ways, with foraging being guided by visual,
chemical or temporal cues, done individually or in groups and with different diets and food
preferences. With that in mind, we seek to, via experiments based on the offering of different
types and quantities of food, identify the preferred source of food by the ponerine ant
Odontomachus haematodus. This species belongs to the same genus as other species on
which a clear preference for a given food source was identified. Besides food preference, we
seek to ascertain the possibility of recruitment occurring in O. haematodus as it occurs in a
primitive form in other species of the genus and in a more complex form in other ponerine
ants.