Assembléias de formigas predadoras-necrófagas sobre iscas simulando a decomposição de carcaças

Abstract

Ants play a crucial role in the process of corpse decomposition, mainly because it is one of the first groups of organisms to detect decomposing carcass; however there are few studies that have already investigated the behavior of interactions between species that engage in mastering and consuming this type of resource. Thus, this study’s objective is to assess how the interactions occur with ants that act as predators-scavengers of carcasses in baits that mimic this type of resource. Samples were collected in a forest fragment located in the city of Dourados, MS. There were been made collections monthly for a year and for each collection the observations occurred over 12 consecutive hours, from 6:00 to 18:00 pm. We used three types of baits: fish, beef liver and chicken entrails. There have been used the alitrunk measurement on ants and calculated flow rate of individuals and aggressiveness of ants visiting the baits to assess the importance of these factors so that ants can be able to dominate and exploit the resource. Throughout the collection period there have been collected 34 species of ants, only 27 of these interacted in baits, only 4 species visited chicken baits, 1 in fish, and 2 in beef liver, and 10 were common to these three types of baits. Ants took an average of more or less 4.1 minutes, 1.8 minutes to find the baits, which were visited on average of 2.11 foragers per minute. According to Jaccard clustering analysis, the ants formed three distinctively groups, the group that presented the most appropriate strategy to dominate and consume baits were those that, even though was not the most aggressive, arrived in the baits with large flow of foragers.