Animal Comparative Economics lab

Invasive ants are economically damaging, ecologically devastating, and extremely hard to control. Indeed, to date, most eradication attempts have failed. We hope that by studying the behavioural biology of invasive ants, with a focus on foraging behaviour, we can gain new insights into how invasive ants evade our control efforts, and ultimately how we can better control them. To this end we are developing new techniques for sensitively assessing feeding preference, examining how the ants transmit information about food sources, and uncovering the ways in which ants can evade toxic baits set out in an effort to control them.

We developed the Dual Feeder assay to quickly and sensitively assess whether a food additive is aversive or appetative to ants. Read more on here, and why not print your own feeder and deploy the method yourself? STL and Freecad models here!