The name is absent



first study, to my knowledge, examining colony-level competition between a long
established invasive ant and newly introduced ant species.

Relative colony size has been shown to be important in determining the outcome
of competitive interactions between colonies. In Argentine ants, competitive
performance increases with colony size in laboratory trials against native ants, and a
threshold of relative abundance is necessary for Argentine ants to maintain a dominant
worker presence at baits (Holway and Case 2001, Walters and Mackay 2005). Studies
with red imported fire ants have also indicated the importance of relative abundance, as
competitive success is affected by colony size in trials with native as well as invasive ants
(Morrison 2000, Kabashima et al. 2007). Therefore, in the laboratory experiment we
paired crazy ants and fire ants in colony units that had been standardized by either
biomass or worker number. Additionally, the crazy ant colonies used in the field
experiment were smaller than the existing fire ant nests. Together, testing the
competitive ability of these different relative abundances of crazy ants may lead to
important conclusions about the ability of the Rasberry crazy ant to expand its range in
the face of competition from fire ants.

One advantage of a colony-level approach is that is possible to examine
recruitment to and dominance of baits, in addition to fighting and mortality. Ant species
are often classified as either opportunists, which specialize in discovering baits quickly;
extirpators, which arrive to baits later but dominate discovered resources; or insinuators,
which inconspicuously thieve food from dominant ants (Wilson 1971). Fellers (1987)
first proposed that there may be an evolutionary trade-off between resource discovery and
behavioral dominance of resources, a hypothesis known as the dominance-discovery

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