What if the ants found themselves enslaved? it would cost enslavers 66% of their offspring

Ants are one of the most fascinating animals in the world. They build ant colonies around a "queen", the queen, while other ants in the ant colony have a clear division of labor. These ants with different responsibilities are collectively called worker ants, and workers with different responsibilities even have different physiological structures.

While all worker ants are female diploids, all but the queen are sterile, and they exist to serve the colony rather than go out to find a mate and carry on their genes.

Now researchers are still very confused about the behavior of worker ants, but they have figured out why worker ants do not leave the queen to reproduce independently, because the queen ant uses certain chemicals (called pheromones) to control the survival mode of the entire ant colony. Including inhibition of worker ant wing growth and ovary development.

However, this pheromone-dependent survival mode is not without its shortcomings, and it can even be said that it is very easy to fall into the "evolutionary trap" created by other species, thereby causing losses to the ant colony.

For example, some species of ants use pheromones to control ants in other colonies, allowing those worker ants to work and labor for their colony.

These "slavery" ants are often called slave ants, and they basically maintain their colonies by enslaving other species of ants.

So, how do slave ants enslave other ants, and what will happen to those enslaved ants if they find themselves enslaved?

If one were to rank the strangest ant colonies, the slave ants would definitely be on top.

In slave ant colonies, we can see groups of ants of completely different colors working together harmoniously, sometimes with two colors, sometimes with more colors.

As we said earlier, the survival characteristics of ants are very easy to be exploited, so there are many kinds of "slavery" ants. They have evolved independently many times and are distributed all over the world.

For these "slavery" ants, most species will only enslave one type of ant, while individual species of slave ants will prey on many other ants.

They generally have two modes, either directly mimicking the pheromones of other enslaved colonies, or by directly capturing the eggs of other colonies.

In the first case, slave ants and enslaved ants are basically close relatives, and they themselves have very similar pheromones. When slave ants occupy the ant nest of enslaved ants and kill the queen, slave ants The ant queen will imitate the original queen and release similar pheromones to control the ant colony.

The second "slavery" situation is more complicated. Slave ants will also attack other nests, but they will kill all the ants that have hatched and then move the eggs to their own nest.

Since ants have a memory for their understanding of pheromones—researchers have long found that ants remember pheromones from other different species of ants, ants’ understanding of pheromones can be acquired.

Some slave ants take advantage of this situation and use their own pheromones to control ant larvae as soon as they hatch, and the ant larvae don't feel anything wrong, even if they have completely different "skin colors" from each other. .

Although the "slavery" of the two modes is slightly different, the results are similar, that is, the worker ants who own slave ants do nothing and are responsible for capturing other ant nests, while all other tasks are done by enslaved ants. .

In order to better capture other ant nests, slave ants only hatch one type of worker ants responsible for fighting. These worker ants have oversized jaws and are amazingly powerful, but they cannot feed on their own, so they can only rely on enslaved ants for feeding. .

Those enslaved ants need to gather food, clean their nests, and care for larvae and queens, all for the continuation of other species.

All this seems very unreasonable for enslaved ants, so you may be wondering why slave ants are evolutionarily able to make these enslaved ants "obedient".

The mutual restraint of slavery and slavery

In fact, it is not particularly reasonable for us to view the behavior of ants with the subjective thought of human slavery. The slavery behavior of ants is much more complicated than we imagine.

Slave ants may have originally evolved in a "war" between ants. When they launched an attack on a nearby nest, the victor carried the eggs of the loser back to its own nest as a food reserve.

However, some eggs hatched during the storage process, but the hatched ants could be used by slave ants. Over time, slave ants went to extremes and became only responsible for capture, while other things were "outsourced" "Do it for other ants.

Indeed, it would be more appropriate to use "outsourcing" rather than "enslavement" here, because enslaved ants are not meaningless most of the time.

Researchers studying a species of slave ant in North America and its enslaved objects found that those enslaved ants restrict the development of slave ant populations, allowing their own populations to grow.

This North American slave ant, Protomognathus americanus, is a very typical slave ant that loses all abilities except fighting. Their bodies are red, and we'll call them red ants from now on.

The enslaved ones are Temnothorax longispinosus, and they happen to be black, so let's call them black ants.

Both black ants and red ants are relatively large in size, and the ant colonies are relatively small, but the reasons for the small ant colonies of the two types of ants are different.

Black ants are due to the fact that they live in a variable and fragile environment, often inhabiting a makeshift nest in forest fallen leaves - usually an acorn that cannot hold too many members.

This environment forces black ants to relocate regularly, and sometimes if more than one suitable nest is found, the colony will split, leaving many black ant societies living in multiple nests close to each other.

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When the red ants raid, they will only attack one nest at a time, and then get the loot, while other black ant nests will not have any effect.

The reason why they can only attack one nest is that the number of red ants is very limited, and they must concentrate on attacking only one nest.

And the reason red ant colonies fail to grow is that the captured black ants keep killing their larvae and eggs. The researchers found that about two-thirds—66 percent of the red ants’ eggs and larvae—will Removed by black ants.

No one now knows why the black ants do this (scavenge slave ants' offspring), although it's hard to attribute it to post-enslavement defiance (they shouldn't be conscious of it), but in any case what they're doing gives other The "sister ant nest" provides shelter.

at last:

There is no doubt that slave ants and enslaved subjects are in an evolutionary "arms race", and their relationship is not much different from that of predators and prey.

Slave ants try to make better use of those enslaved ants, and enslaved ants try to get rid of enslavement, but everything ends in the same way - to grow their population.

In this evolutionary "arms race", black ants in North America have just found a restrictive mode for removing red ant larvae. I don't know if other enslaved ants have other modes.

But another animal that behaves much like a slave ant has a win-win model: the cuckoo bird.

While cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, cuckoo chicks sometimes provide a protective mechanism for the nests—their smelly guano can repel the parasitized bird’s predators, thereby increasing the protection of the nest. Survival of offspring of parasitic birds.

This model of cuckoo birds is equivalent to paying rent. I wonder if there are slave ants that will provide some outsourced service fees.

In any case, it is certain that the slave ants and their enslaved objects are in harmony, because neither has yet been extinct and has been discovered by us.