London, Oct 3 (IANS) Getting to the top involves mean street level fighting, especially among queen ants, who resort to mob tactics to ensure their dominance, new research has found.
Researchers from the University of Regensburg, Germany, studied the behaviour of an ant species L. acervorum, in Spain.
In these colonies only a single queen was able to reproduce. All the other queens either did not yet have active ovaries or their ovaries had reverted to an inactive state.
The ants were observed fighting, both queen to queen, and worker ants to queens.
However the inter-queen fighting involved ritualistic antennal boxing and mandible threats, while the workers were more vicious, and also pulled and bit low ranking queens, according to a Regensburg statement.
The top queen was decided by the infighting between the queens. However, the queen’s reproductive status was not predicted by worker ants’ violence but rather was reinforced by the workers feeding and grooming the more dominant queens.
‘These ants live high on mountain slopes — which makes dispersal and colony formation difficult,’ said study author Juergen Trittin.
‘Under these circumstances the colony cannot support more than one reproductive queen and limited resources make it disadvantageous for the colony to allow low ranking queens to leave and start their own colonies,’ he added.
‘Destruction of habitat, for instance due to climate change, may cause this behaviour to become extinct,’ Trittin said.
