A year in an ant's life: Opportunism and seasonal variation in the foraging ecology of<i>Aphaenogaster senilis</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ants are important consumers in most terrestrial ecosystems. They show a great diversity of diets and foraging strategies. Here, we analyzed how circannual variation in resource use by the Mediterranean species Aphaenogaster senilis is related to colony life cycle and resource availability. In southwestern Spain, this species is active almost year-round, but foraging intensity decreases 10-fold between March and November, following larval production. In the summer, ants refrain from foraging at midday to avoid high temperatures. We hypothesized that diet and foraging plasticity could also explain the ecological success of this species. There are several techniques for assessing the diet of ants. Combining isotope analyses with conventional methods can provide better taxonomic resolution of resource utilization. Using a combination of classic and isotopic analyses, we found that 1) the proportion of plant and animal-derived items collected by foragers did not vary significantly from March to November, and 2) isotope analyses indicated a decrease in the trophic level of A. senilis between June and September, suggesting a difference between collected material and items assimilated. Interestingly, most animal prey were collected by individual ants, and many were retrieved alive. Therefore, A. senilis is not only a scavenger, but also a non-negligible predator, particularly of aphids. The abundance of the most common animal-derived items in the diet was proportional to their abundance in the study area. We conclude that A. senilis is an opportunistic species that is able to feed on a variety of resources, which may be key to its ecological success.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".