ant.dew {asbio}

Ant honeydew data

Description

Wright et al. (2000) examined behavior of red wood ants (Formica rufa), a species that harvests honeydew in aphids. Worker ants traveled from their nests to nearby trees to forage honeydew from homopterans. Ants descending trees were laden with food and weighed more, given a particular ant head width, then unladen, ascending ants. The authors were interested in comparing regression parameters of the ascending and descending ants to create a predictive model of honeydew foraging load for a given ant size.

Usage

data(ant.dew)

Format

A data frame with 72 observations on the following 3 variables.

head.width

Ant head width in mm

ant.mass

Ant mass in mg

direction

Direction of travel A = ascending, D = descending

Details

Data approximated from Fig. 1 in Wright et al. (2002)

Source

Wright, P. J., Bonser, R., and U. O. Chukwu (2000) The size-distance relationship in the wood ant Formica rufa. Ecological Entomology 25(2): 226-233.