Preferência alimentar e estratégias de forrageio de Odontomachus haematodus linnaeus, 1758 (Hymenoptera: formicidae) em ambiente laboratorial

Abstract

Ants, who are amongst eusocial insects, are notorious for their task allocation. One of those activities is foraging, which consists in the exploration of the surroundings of the nest, hunting or gathering of food items and transport of this resource back to the nest to share it with nestmates. This activity is based on two main strategies, solitary or group foraging, and can occur under various means of orientation, such as guided by visual, chemical or temporal cues, with different diets and food preferences. With that, this dissertation had as its objective to investigate, by the means of food offering experiments, the preference of the species Odontomachus haematodus in relation to its diet and food collection mechanisms in a laboratory setting, including an investigation of the possibility of recruitment, in a foraging context and cooperative transport of food items. Our results indicate a clear preference for food items rich in liquids and a lesser preference for a carnivorous diet than we expected, with a natural variability between the colonies. Furthermore, we did not observe occurrences of recruitment of nestmates nor cooperative food transport