limiting the establishment and spread of crazy ants in habitats where fire ants are
common.
Diet differences had no effect on intraspecific crazy ant interactions after 12 days.
No fighting was observed between any of the workers, and the highest scoring interaction
recorded was avoidance, which occurred only 5 times. Mortality did not differ among
pairs that received different diets, pairs receiving the same diet, and controls of 5 ants.
The lack of antagonistic interactions between crazy ants that received different diets may
indicate that diet changes alone do not disrupt the chemical profile of the workers enough
to overcome the Unicoloniality of the introduced population. However, several studies
that have examined the effect of diet on intraspecific interactions have found that
aggression can be induced between unicolonial nests or former nestmates (Liang et al.
2001, Silverman and Liang 2001, Buczkowski and Silverman 2006, Corin et al. 2007).
For example, Corin et al. (2007) found aggression between unicolonial Argentine ant
nests after 56 days of diet maintenance, and Silverman and Liang (2001), who studied
interactions between separated nestmates consuming different prey at several intervals for
56 days, found that former nestmates fought each other after 28 days. Additionally, Lim
et al. examined interactions between nestmates of Paratrechina Iongicornis and found
antagonistic behavior beginning at 21 days after the implementation of diet treatments
(Lim et al. 2003). Together, these studies could suggest that the absence of intraspecific
aggression in Rasberry crazy ants is due to the treatments not being maintained long
enough to for nestmate recognition to be affected. Nevertheless, one study of Argentine
ants showed antagonistic behavior between nestmates after as little as 2 minutes of
contact with a prey item, the brown-banded cockroach, Supella Iongipalpa (Liang et al.
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