Insectes Sociaux - Special Issue: Foraging behaviours of ants
Submissions close: 31/07/2025
Editors (in alphabetical order):
Claire Detrain1 (claire.detrain@ulb.be)
Elva Robinson2 (elva.robinson@york.ac.uk)
Maria Eduarda de Lima Vieira3 (eduardalv@usp.br)
Nicolas Châline3 (nchaline@usp.br)
Noa Pinter-Wollman4 (nmpinter@ucla.edu)
Patrizia d’Ettorre5 (d-ettorre@univ-paris13.fr)
Tomer Czaczkes6 (tomer.czaczkes@ur.de)
Email for contact: Nicolas Châline (nchaline@usp.br)
1. Unit of Social Ecology, Université Libre de Bruxelles, CP231, Boulevard du Triomphe,1050 Brussels, Belgium
2. Department of Biology, University of York, York YO10 4LZ, UK
3. Laboratório de Etologia, Ecologia E Evolução de Insetos, Sociais, Departamento de Psicologia Experimental, Instituto de Psicologia Experimental, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
4. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
5. Laboratory of Experimental and Comparative Ethology, UR 4443 (LEEC), Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, 99 avenue J.-B. Clément, Villetaneuse, 93430, France
6. University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany
This special issue welcomes reviews and articles highlighting the foraging behaviours of ants and their associated mechanisms, with a special attention to the four questions of Tinbergen on proximate mechanisms, development, function and evolution and their reciprocal interactions.
Background
Foraging as a group requires a suite of food acquisition related behaviours which are diverse and flexible. Getting food requires searching, localising, manipulating, transporting, and storing food. These behaviours may be associated with complex perception, information processing, and decision making, which can impact individual and group fitness. In central place foragers, such as ants, the forager is rarely the individual that consumes the resource. This means that in terms of behavioural decisions, the evaluation of colony needs and colony state interacts with the information needed for successful foraging.
Being social also means that information can be gathered and shared collectively. Among social species, ants are probably the group with the largest array of foraging behaviours, including some of the most elaborate in their flexibility and ability to cope with rapid changes in resource characteristics. Ants are considered to be some of the most important organisms ecologically, and their influence stems mainly from their foraging habits which makes them top predators, major pests, seed dispersers, and ecosystem engineers. Their predominance means that their foraging behaviours have been studied extensively, in particular in species with mass recruitment. However, there are other types of foraging strategies, from individual foraging of most ponerine ants to enormous raids of army ants.
Aims and Scope
To gain a holistic understanding of any behaviour, it must be studied at all levels of analysis, including mechanism, development, function, and evolution (i.e., Tinbergen’s 4 questions). While the collective foraging of ants has been studied extensively, there has been much emphasis on the mechanisms that underlie ant foraging; however, questions about the development, function, and evolution of ant foraging have been lagging behind. We feel it is timely to propose a special issue on the ethology of ant foraging to bring back the integrative aspects of ethology to this research area and the balance between proximate and ultimate explanations of behaviour. Ants have both elaborate communication systems and collective responses which allow the exploration of many aspects of social foraging, at both the individual and group level. We hope that this special issue will bring together research from scientists using a diversity of approaches and models that will give a better understanding of ant foraging behaviours at all levels of analysis, following Tinbergen’s four questions. We think that it is necessary to fully understand how ants collect food at all levels of analysis. Such a thorough examination can further improve our knowledge about foraging in other species.
We invite all scientists working on behaviours associated with foraging in ants to contribute
to this topic and will aim to balance the special issue in regards to papers that address
mechanisms, development, function and evolution about ant foraging.
All manuscripts submitted to the Special Issue will undergo the Journal’s standard peer review process.
Important Submission Information
To submit a manuscript for this Special Issue, authors should follow the steps below:
1. Authors submit their papers through the following website https://www.editorialmanager.com/inso/default2.aspx
2. Under “Additional Information”, authors must select “Yes” to their manuscript being submitted to a Special Issue, then choose “Foraging behaviours of ants”
Contact
If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact Guest Editor Nicolas Châline (nchaline@usp.br) or Editor-in-Chief Madeleine Beekman (madeleine.beekman@sydney.edu.au)