Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [173]
43. JR Malcolm, Insect biomass in Amazonian forest fragments, in Canopy Arthropods, ed. NE Stork, J Adis, RK Didham (London: Chapman & Hall, 1997), pp. 510–533.
44. Deby Cassill, personal communication; D Cassill 2003, Rules of supply and demand regulate recruitment to food in an ant society, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 54: 441–450; and Thomas D. Seeley, The Wisdom of the Hive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
45. AA Sorensen, TM Busch, SB Vinson 1985, Control of food influx by temporal subcastes in the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 17: 191–198.
46. The body takes what you give it: only nutrients such as iron and calcium are subject to shifts in absorption based on need (though communication between the gut and brain can help regulate appetite); see OB Chaudhri, V Salem, KG Murphy, SR Bloom 2008, Gastrointestinal satiety signals, Annu. Rev. Physiol. 70: 239–256.
47. Marauder ants and army ants kill Homoptera rather than collect honeydew, though for examples to the contrary, see William H. Gotwald Jr., Army Ants: The Biology of Social Predation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Because nomadic ants are unlikely to return to the same spot, eating the honeydew yields these ants a lower payoff than predation.
10. Fortified Forests
1. Some of my discussion of canopy biology in this chapter is adapted from MW Moffett 2001, Nature and limits of canopy biology, Selbyana 22: 155–179; and Mark W. Moffett, The High Frontier: Exploring the Tropical Rainforest Canopy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
2. DW Yu 1994, The structural role of epiphytes in ant gardens, Biotropica 26: 222–226.
3. At least one of the epiphytes has seeds with a scent attractive to the ants; see E Youngsteadt, S Nojima, C Häberlein, S Schulz, C Schal 2008, Seed odor mediates an obligate ant-plant mutualism in Amazonian rainforests, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 105: 4571–4575.
4. A Vantaux, A Dejean, A Dor, J Orivel 2007, Parasitism versus mutualism in the ant-garden parabiosis between Camponotus femoratus and Crematogaster levior, Insectes Soc. 54: 95–99; and DW Davidson 1988, Ecological studies of neotropical ant gardens, Ecology 69: 1138–1152.
5. The most abundant ant species, measured in numbers of individuals, are among the most successful organisms; see JE Tobin, Ecology and diversity of tropical forest canopy ants, in Forest Canopies, ed. Margaret D. Lowman and Nalini M. Nadkarni (St. Louis, MO: Academic Press, 1995), pp. 129–147. It would be interesting to study the abundance of ant species in terms of numbers of colonies, as it perhaps should be measured.
6. AY Harada, J Adis, The ant fauna of tree canopies in central Amazonia: A first assessment, in Canopy Arthropods, ed. Nigel E. Stork, Joachim Adis, and Raphael K. Didham (London: Chapman & Hall, 1998), pp. 382–400.
7. JE Tobin, Ants as primary consumers: Diet and abundance in the Formicidae, in Nourishment and Evolution in Insect Societies, ed. James H. Hunt and Christine A. Nalepa (Boulder, CO: Westwood Press, 1994), pp. 129–147.
8. The data on the relative abundance and biomass of ants in the ground are scarce and may be skewed by the numbers of minute mites and springtails in the soil; but see EJ Fittkau, H Klinge 1973, On biomass and trophic structure of the central Amazonian rain forest ecosystem, Biotropica 5: 2–14. Many ground-dwelling species depend on nectaries or Homoptera residing on shrubs, herbs, and the roots of larger plants.
9. This shift in diet occurred several thousand years prior to agriculture (see chapter 15). Of course, both weaver ant colonies and humans in similarly entrenched settlements catch large prey when they can; see, e.g., B Hayden 1990, Nimrods, piscators, pluckers, and planters: The emergence of food production, J. Anthropol. Archaeol.