 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
 Avgar,
Tal - MSc Student, Nathan Lab Berman building, room 101
|
|
Research Interest: Ecology of Eusocial insects I am a MSc student in the Movement Ecology lab. I investigate how granivore ants alter the spatial patterns of plants early recruitment stages. My case study is an arid ecosystem with a dominant wind-dispersed perennial shrub (Noaea mucronata) that is subject to post-dispersal predation by two species of harvester ants (Messor ebeninus and M. arenarius), differing in their foraging behavior. M. ebeninus is a highly social forager - it uses pheromonal cues to inform nestmates of the location of high-density resources, thus recruiting the colony to utilize a specific resource at a specific location. M. arenarius is a semi-social forager - the number of foraging individuals is influenced by the colony's resource-intake rate but nestmates do not share information regarding the location of the resource. I investigate the formation of different establishment patterns through altering parameters of the dispersal-predation mechanism.
|
|