The name is absent

are known to produce winged males and females, nuptial flights have never been
observed in the native range (Texas A&M 2008).

Because so little is known about the ecology of this exotic ant, I conducted a
series of laboratory and field experiments designed to explore the nature of the
intraspecific interactions between Rasberry crazy ants, as well as the individual and
colony-level competitive ability of crazy ants in comparison to the dominant ant species
in its introduced range, the red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, which is also an
introduced species. Together these experiments addressed the issues of Unicoloniality,
the effect of diet on aggressive encounters, resource acquisition, and most importantly,
biotic resistance by fire ants to the crazy ant invasion. In Chapter 2,1 performed a series
of aggression assays between crazy ants and fire ant workers of different sizes, between
crazy ant workers from colonies receiving one of two protein sources and high or low
doses of sugar, and between fire ants and crazy ant workers receiving the different diets.
I found that large fire ants engaged in fewer fights than small fire ants, but fire ant size
affected neither fire ant nor crazy ant mortality. On average, crazy ants experienced
higher mortality than fire ants after antagonistic interactions. Diet did not induce
aggressive interactions between crazy ants, but sugar level did play an important role in
antagonistic interactions with fire ants, as crazy ants on a low sugar diet earned higher
aggression scores.

The experiments in Chapter 3 examined colony-level interactions between crazy
ants and fire ants both in the field and in the laboratory. In the laboratory experiment,
colonies of fire ants and crazy ants were standardized by worker number or by biomass
and used as either controls or in competing pairs that had access to a single set of protein

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