Cover Picture and Issue Information

Animals often display a marked tendency to return to previously visited locations that contain important resources, such as water, food, or developing brood that must be provisioned. Ant colonies typically consist of different worker castes which each exhibit fidelity to different sites within the nest; nurses stay inside and tend to the brood, whereas outside‐nest workers forage and guard the nest entrance. This image depicts brood and workers of the rock ant Temnothorax albipennis , which displays strong site fidelity. In this issue, Richardson et al identify the important sites to which individuals are attracted through statistical comparisons between the observed spatial trajectories (gathered from workers each marked with a unique combination of coloured paint dots), and null model trajectories that lack spatial biases. By quantifying the overlap between the sites visited by different workers, they construct spatial networks in which individuals are strongly connected if they frequent the same spatial locations, or weakly connected if they frequent different parts of the nest. Whilst many studies have used encounter patterns to identify sub‐populations within animal groups, the spatial networks provide an alternative framework for identifying sub‐groups within large societies in which individuals may visit the same places, but never make contact. Photo credit: © N. R. Franks, University of Bristol