Forestry alters foraging efficiency and crop contents of aphid-tending red wood ants, Formica aquilonia.

ABSTRACT: Forest management alters species behaviours, distributions and interactions. To evaluate forestry effects on ant foraging performance, we compared the quality and quantity of honeydew harvested by ants among clear-cuts, middle-aged and mature spruce-dominated stands in boreal forests in Sweden. Honeydew quality was examined using honeydew collected by squeezing the gasters of laden Formica aquilonia workers. We used fifteen laden individuals at each study site (four replicates of each stand age) and analysed honeydew chemical composition with gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy. To compare the quantity of honeydew collected by individual ants, we collected and weighed five ants moving up and five ants moving down each of ten trees at the twelve sites (totally 1200 ants). The concentration

SUBMITTER: Johansson T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3302777 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature