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Effect of substrate roughness on load selection in the seed-harvester ant Messor barbarus L. (Hymenoptera, Formicidae)

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Abstract

We investigated the effect of substrate roughness on load selection in the seed-harvester ant Messor barbarus. Ants were forced to travel either on sand or on gravel to reach a seed patch containing seed fragments of different weights. We hypothesized that foragers travelling on a rough substrate could either increase their load as a result of the increased distance travelled (due to a more sinuous path and an increase in the vertical component of the path) or decrease their load because of the anticipated difficulty of moving with a heavy load on a rough surface. Our results were consistent with neither of these hypotheses: Load selection by ants did not depend on the roughness of the substrate encountered during their outbound trip. The main effect of substrate roughness was to slow down the progression of the ants and increase their probability of dropping or transferring heavy seeds on their way back to the nest, thus resulting in an overall reduction of the rate of seed return to the nest.

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Acknowledgements

A.B. was financed by a doctoral grant from the Fundació Crèdit Andorra.

Ethical standards

The experiments comply with the current laws of the country in which they were performed.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Toulouse, UPS, Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062, Toulouse Cedex 9, France

    Abel Bernadou, Virginie Dos-Reis & Vincent Fourcassié

  2. CNRS, Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062, Toulouse Cedex 9, France

    Abel Bernadou, Virginie Dos-Reis & Vincent Fourcassié

  3. Departament de Biologia Animal, de Biologia Vegetal i d’Ecologia, Facultat de Ciències, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193, Bellaterra, Spain

    Abel Bernadou & Xavier Espadaler

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  1. Abel Bernadou
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  2. Xavier Espadaler
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  3. Virginie Dos-Reis
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  4. Vincent Fourcassié
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Correspondence to Abel Bernadou.

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Communicated by L. Sundström

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Bernadou, A., Espadaler, X., Dos-Reis, V. et al. Effect of substrate roughness on load selection in the seed-harvester ant Messor barbarus L. (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). Behav Ecol Sociobiol 65, 1763–1771 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-011-1184-4

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