Thaindian News

London, Feb 26 (IANS) Social insects, ants in particular, are usually thought of as selfless entities willing to sacrifice everything for their comrades. However, research suggests that ant queens are also prepared to compromise the welfare of the entire colony in order to retain the throne.
A team from the University of Copenhagen, led by Luke Holman of the Centre for Social Evolution, found that ant queens are much more devious than previously thought.

Often, an ant colony has more than one queen. Multiple queens can produce a larger initial workforce in incipient colonies, increasing the chance that the colony will survive the hazardous first year.

But queens do not happily cohabit forever; soon after the young workers hatch, they begin to slaughter surplus queens until only one remains.

Ant queens were found to cleverly adjust new workers they produce for the colony. Queens produce fewer workers when sharing the colony with other queens, especially if the colony already has many developing workers.

Queens, therefore, seem to know when they can expect a showdown for the throne, and conserve energy accordingly.

Such strategic investment in worker production is complemented by sophisticated chemical communication by queens.

Ants have been called “walking chemical factories” because they produce many different odours for tasks such as recognising friends and enemies and signalling their status and role within the colony.

Workers appear to select the fertile queen as their ruler, based on smell, said a Copenhagen release.

“Execution of the most selfish ant queens by workers would increase the incentive for queens to be team-players that work hard to help the colony. This rudimentary ‘legal system’ could have helped ants to evolve their highly-advanced societies, just as in humans,” says Holman.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.