ABSTRACT
Ants are considered useful organisms to test hypotheses about foraging strategies because their foragers usually leave from a xed nest site to collect food (e.g., Detrain and Deneubourg 2002). The development of models and hypotheses about ant foraging ecology, however, is constrained by the small amount of quantitative data on the foraging behavior of different ant taxa. The lack of data on the basic ecological features of ants is particularly evident in the Neotropical region, where these insects are extraordinarily abundant and diversied (Brown 2000).
