Veromessor

When foraging, Veromessor pergandei workers typically retrieve seeds on the ground, which have fallen naturally. Occasionally however, they will remove seeds directly from plants. At this location we observed three workers clipping seeds from an unidentified grass species. This was a tiny percent of the foraging worker force active at the time, which numbered many hundreds of ants. Regarding the often-harvested seeds of the grass Schismus arabicus, S.W. Rissing observed "...'clipping' on less than 10 occasions (always by less than 5% of the current foraging force) during several thousand hours of field observations." [scroll down for additional notes/references]