Abstract
Sex ratios of ants have been shown to vary with food resource levels in several studies, but it is not known whether forest clear-cutting has any effect on sex ratio of aphid-tending forest-dwelling ants. We investigated whether the offspring sex ratio of the forest dwelling ant Formica aquilonia varied as a response to clear-cutting. We found that the proportion of males was smaller in clear-cuts than in adjacent forests. Our results are among the first showing that anthropogenic changes in forest structures may have a potential to modify sex ratios of social insects and other forest-dwelling animals.
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Acknowledgements
We thank JM Bono, WD Brown, P Punttila, L Sundström, and K Wiebe for comments on the manuscript. I Barr kindly checked the language of the manuscript. The study was funded by grants from the Academy of Finland. The field experiment complied with the current laws of Finland.
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Sorvari, J., Hakkarainen, H. Forest clearing and sex ratio in forest-dwelling wood ant Formica aquilonia . Naturwissenschaften 94, 392–395 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-006-0201-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-006-0201-3