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When army ants move out, a new study found that, instead of chasing each other away, birds work together to follow the column and hunt the insects that marching ants scare out of hiding.
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| Ruddy woodcreeper, a bivouac-checking species |
- Finding that birds largely work together to forage at army ant raids seems to demonstrate that cooperation is a better survival strategy than trying to keep food from the raids for their own species.
- In watching for the raids and the flocks that "attend" them, a key to avian cooperation may be what are termed "bivouac-checking" birds.
- These are birds that perch near the sites where army ants make their nests (bivouacs) and watch to see where and when the ants move.
- So when bivouac-checking birds see the movement of the columns and take off, other birds take the cue. They either know birds like the ocellated antbird follow ant columns or recognize vocalizations the specialized birds make when chasing the colonies.
- Birds may use each other as a way of finding army ant raids, which are very hard to locate in the forest because they are widely spaced and the ants are mobile.
Army ants scare up a lot of food when they're on the move, which makes following them valuable for predator birds. But instead of competing and chasing each other off from the ant "raids," as scientists had thought, birds actually give each other a heads up when the ants are marching, according to a new Drexel University study.
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