Chapter 1: Principles of Animal Behavior
Army Ants Swarm Spider
Video © Tim Brown / Time-Science.com
A harvestman (order Opiliones) is swarmed by army ants (Eciton burchellii), but as with several other arachnids and some insects, it remains motionless, thereby escaping unscathed. Eciton army ants rely almost exclusively on vibrational and chemical cues to detect prey, and they refrain from biting or stinging inanimate objects. In that additional workers are recruited only to subdue active prey items, the foraging swarm of ants eventually passes, leaving the surviving harvestman in their wake. The highly coordinated actions of a foraging ant swarm, often involving hundreds of thousands of individuals, illustrate how simple behavioral rules adopted by individuals can result in highly complex and unpredictable behavior at the level of the system as a whole.
See Chapter 1 – Principles of Animal Behavior, Chapter 10 – Foraging, Chapter 11 – Antipredator Behavior.
Further reading – Brown T. (2003). Modeling behavioral rules and self-organization in new world army ant swarms. In Anderson, C. & Balch, T. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on the Mathematics and Algorithms of Social Insects (pp. 25-31). Georgia Institute of Technology. Atlanta, GA.