Consequences of behavioral vs. numerical dominance on foraging activity of desert seed-eating ants |
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Authors: | Email author" target="_blank">Udi?SegevEmail author Yaron?Ziv |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Life Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, 84105, Israel;(2) Present address: Institute for Plant Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, 76100, Israel |
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Abstract: | Dominance relationships among species play a major role in the structure of animal communities. Yet, dominant species with
different trade-offs in resource exploitation and monopolization could affect community structure in variable ways. In ants,
dominant species could be classified into either behavioral dominants that exhibit territorial aggression or numerical dominants
that exhibit high biomass or frequency of occurrence. While each class of dominance has generally been found to negatively
affect the foraging activity of species in ant communities, the concurrent effect of both classes of species has never been
tested. Here, we examined the effects of two behaviorally dominant species, Crematogaster inermis and Monomorium salomonis, and a numerically dominant species, Messor arenarius, on the foraging behavior of seed-eating species in a desert ant assemblage. In a 1-year study, the foraging activity of
the ant species was assessed using seed baits, which were sampled during night and day. While the numerically dominant species
exhibited high foraging efficiency and negatively affected the ability of other seed-eating species to obtain seeds, significantly
more seeds remained at baits that were occupied the previous night by each of the two behaviorally dominant species, possibly
due to aggressive exclusion of M. arenarius foragers from the baits. This exclusion also facilitated greater foraging activity of the seed-eating species. Our results
demonstrate how these two types of dominance could differently affect the foraging activity of ant species in the community. |
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