1985] 
Pamilo, Crozier, & Fraser — Rhytidoponera 
221 
Table 2. Reproductive status of ants from an apparent incipient colony, in terms 
of the number of ovarioles per ant lacking oocytes. No inseminated ants were found 
during dissections from this group. 
Number of empty ovarioles 
0 1 2 3 4 5 
6 
Total 
166 17 12 16 10 6 
3 
230 
medium cover, and 1.5% with a relatively dense herbaceous cover. 
We determined the foraging area of nest 54 by following individ- 
ual foragers and marking the points at which they turned back for 
the nest (whether they had obtained a food item or not). The distri- 
butions (Table 3) of these most-distant points of foraging trips dif- 
fered significantly (X 2 = 9.59) between September and November, 
with the trip-distances in November being longer. This difference 
may be due to differences in the success rates of foraging trips: 
although we did not record successes and failures, it was readily 
apparent that a majority of trips in September resulted in collection 
of a food item, whereas most November trips ended with ants 
returning unladen. Most food items were brought back to the nest 
by individual workers, but very rarely large items such as large (ca. 5 
cm long) crickets were retrieved by groups; the mechanism of 
recruitment is unknown but may involve short-range communica- 
tion via the powerful stridulation mechanism these ants possess. 
The extent of the overlap between the foraging areas of adjacent 
nests cannot be quantified in the absence of data, such as in Table 3, 
collected for adjacent nests simultaneously, but it is clearly consid- 
erable, in that many ants walked beyond the edge of the figure 
described around their home nest by its neighbors (figure 1). 
To determine the extent to which individual workers show fidelity 
in foraging direction over several trips we marked individual forag- 
ers from two nests (54 and 6) and subdivided the nest environs into 
eight equal-sized radial sectors. We recorded the sectors in which 
each marked individual foraged. The extent of fidelity can then be 
Table 3. Most distant points reached during individual foraging trips from nest 
54 during the two observation periods. 
0-5 m 
5-10 m 
10-15 m 
> 15 m 
Total 
September 
6 
20 
10 
2 
38 
November 
6 
16 
22 
13 
57 
