Fire ants: where do they live and what do they eat?

Abstract

Ants are social insects that build sophisticated nests that work in complex ways and can consist of up to hundreds of inner chambers used for offspring care. Solenopsis saevissima (Smith, 1855) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) plays a relevant role in public health because of reactions to its sting and its action as vectors of infectious agents by stinging. In the present study, we aimed at a global recent review of all works that contain records of Solenopsis nesting sites in the last years. In addition, these ants are relevant in forensic entomology because of the interference they cause in the decomposition process and another aim of this study was to describe an evaluation of S. saevissima feeding selection behavior against different food stimuli: decomposing meat with and without eggs and larvae of the Califoridae species Chrysomya albiceps (Wiedemann, 1819) aiming to unveil scientific advances, analyze the information and point out incipient areas of research in studies in this area, thus allowing to advance the knowledge about the behavior of individuals of this genus and their particularities. The literature review was performed on the Web of Science and Scopus platforms of all works published since 1945 up to January 2020. We retrieved information from the articles found and sorted about: year of study, place of registration, species found and substrate used for nesting. We found 43 articles containing records of the nesting sites of Solenopsis ants. The articles were published in 24 scientific journals and in total we registered 10 species in the studies found. Ants preferred to nest in natural environments and the main areas of development of the studies found were the United States, Brazil and Argentina respectively, in addition, the species most reported in the works was Solenopsis invicta Buren (1972). In the selection experiment, observations were made from March 2018 to October 2019. The work analyzed the possible selection behavior of fire ants against decaying meat combinations with C. albiceps eggs x decaying meat without eggs and decaying meat with C. albiceps larvae x decaying meat without larvae. There was no food selection by the fire ants in the tests performed (p <0.05), but we could observe a correlation between flow and temperature. Our results reinforced the relationship between metabolic maintenance and temperature in these individuals beyond their omnivorous habit.