Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [182]
18. See Stephen B. Vander Wall, Food Hoarding in Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 64. This advantage for slavery in temperate ants could exist even though ants generally do better than solitary insects in hunkering down in their nests to wait out hard times.
19. M Kaspari, L Alonso, S O’Donnell 2000, Three energy variables predict ant abundance at a geographical scale, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 267: 485–489.
14. A Fungus Farmer’s Life
1. In this book I do not distinguish leafcutter species unless there are known differences between them. For a general review, see Rainer Wirth, Hubert Herz, Ronald J. Ryel, Wolfram Beyschlag, and Bert Hölldobler, Herbivory of Leaf-Cutting Ants: A Case Study on Atta colombica in the Tropical Rainforest of Panama (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2003).
2. Leafcutter workers of all sizes respond to disturbances in the nest, but the largest, the “soldiers,” are particularly effective at repelling vertebrates.
3. SEF Evison, FLW Ratnieks 2007, New role for majors in Atta leafcutter ants, Ecol. Entomol. 32: 451–454. Occasionally the majors (soldiers) help clear trails as well.
4. MW Moffett 1986, Observations of Lophomyrmex ants from Kalimantan, Java, and Malaysia, Malay. Nat. J. 39: 207–211.
5. F Roces, JRB Lighten 1995, Larger bites of leaf-cutting ants, Nature 373: 392–393.
6. AJ Edwards, JD Fawke, JG McClements, SA Smith, P Wyeth 1993, Correlation of zinc distribution and enhanced hardness in the mandibular cuticle of the leaf-cutting ant Atta sexdens rubropilosa, Cell Biol. Int. 17: 697–698.
7. See, e.g., JM van Breda, DJ Stradling 1994, Mechanisms affecting load size determination in Atta cephalotes, Insectes Soc. 41: 423–434.
8. James K. Wetterer, unpublished manuscript.
9. There is some evidence that leafcutter ants are unable to cooperate in carrying any object, no matter what its shape; see JJ Howard 2001, Costs of trail construction and maintenance in the leaf-cutting ant Atta columbica, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 49: 348–356.
10. Still, larger ants have relatively shorter legs and cut fragments small for their size; see JK Wetterer 1995, Forager polymorphism and foraging ecology in the leaf-cutting ant, Atta colombica, Psyche 102: 131–145; and JK Wetterer 1991, Allometry and the geometry of leaf-cutting in Atta cephalotes, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 29: 347–351.
11. M Burd, JJ Howard 2005, Global optimization from suboptimal parts: Foraging sensu lato by leaf-cutting ants, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 59: 234–242.
12. OT Lewis, MM Martin, TJ Czaczkes 2008, Effects of trail gradient on leaf tissue transport and load size selection in leaf-cutter ants, Behav. Ecol. 19: 805–809.
13. RJ Quinlan, JM Cherrett 1979, The role of fungus in the diet of the leaf-cutting ant Atta cephalotes, Ecol. Entomol. 4: 151–160.
14. Michael M. Martin, Invertebrate-Microbial Interactions: Ingested Fungal Enzymes in Arthropod Biology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Comstock Publishing Associates, 1987), pp. 107–124.
15. PF Dowd 1992, Insect fungal symbionts: A promising source of detoxifying enzymes, J. Ind. Microbiol. Biotech. 9: 149–161.
16. AB Abril, EH Bucher 2004, Nutritional sources of the fungus cultured by leaf-cutting ants, Appl. Soil Ecol. 26: 243–247.
17. All termites have microbes in their gut to digest cellulose in wood and dried leaves, but Africa’s fungus-growing termites take this process a step further. Their colonies are basically cows within cows. Workers eat the plant matter, then use their feces to create gardens that look surprisingly like the ones leafcutters construct from foliage. The fungi the termite workers eat pass through their digestive systems intact and do not themselves serve as food. Instead, when the fungi are combined with the feces in the gardens, they degrade the feces into a form the termites can eat and fully digest. There are also two families of ambrosia beetle that feed their larvae on hyphae they rear in dead or dying wood, which makes them lumber pests.
18. For descriptions of large nests,