Abstract
The availability of nutrients in the soil acts as a filter in the ants that inhabit this layer, affecting their foraging patterns and showing preferences or limitations on their nutritional needs. Especially in environments far from the ocean, the salt deficit can be a limiting resource in the environment. Here, we test whether changes in species richness and composition reveal food preferences for ants that inhabit the soil, using sugar and salt as attractions in an area of the Amazon Forest. In total, 21 species in nine genera were collected; all species were collected in sugar and only two in salt. In addition to the ant richness eleven times greater in sugar, the composition differed between the attractions. Our results indicate that the litter ants in the preserved forest are not limited by availability of sodium and they prefer sugar to salt as attractant, even with this environment far from the coast.
Highlights
The acquisition of nutritional resources is one of the first challenges faced by all organisms to be able to perform essential processes such as survival, growth and reproduction
Our results suggest that in the local of study, the grounddwelling ants are not limited by sodium availability, with only two species associated to salt baits
Our first hypothesis was rejected, once the greater richness of species was recorded in sugar baits and not in salt baits
Summary
The acquisition of nutritional resources is one of the first challenges faced by all organisms to be able to perform essential processes such as survival, growth and reproduction. In contrast to solitary animals, the ingestion of nutrients in social insects has additional levels of complexity Must they collect food that satisfies their individual nutritionals needs, they forage for other members of the colony (Dussutour & Simpson, 2008; Feldhaar, 2014; Csata & Dussutour, 2019). This retransmission ratio is poorly understood, differences in the nutrients that make up the diet, seem to influence body composition, e.g., protein-fed worker ants showed significantly higher levels of phosphorus in their body mass, while workers fed excess sucrose had a higher C:N ratio (Feldhaar, 2014). Ants are ideal organisms for the study of recruitment and foraging due to their eusocial organization strategy, their wide range of foraging habits associated with other organisms (Hölldobler & Wilson, 1990) and due to their vast distribution in the most of the land ecosystems, reaching the highest diversity level in the tropics (Fernández, 2003; Bolton, 2018)
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