Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The queen is the reproductive member of the colony. Some ant species will only have one queen, while others will form polygynous colonies of multiple queens, such as Argentine ants Linepithema humile. [2] The workers are responsible for supporting the queen, maintenance, and foraging. Unlike queens and drones, workers are born wingless.
In ants, social conflicts, sex conflicts, or caste conflicts can exist. These conflicts occur within the same colony or supercolony at various levels: on an individual scale, between two or more specific ants; on the scale of sex, between males and females; or on the scale of different castes, between queens and workers.
A queen ant (formally known as a gyne) is an adult, reproducing female ant in an ant colony; she is usually the mother of all the other ants in that colony. Some female ants, such as the Cataglyphis , do not need to mate to produce offspring, reproducing through asexual parthenogenesis or cloning , and all of those offspring will be female. [ 1 ]
An ergatoid queen of the species Myrmecia esuriens. An ergatoid (from Greek ergat-, "worker" + -oid, "like") is a permanently wingless reproductive adult ant or termite. [1] [2] The similar but somewhat ambiguous term ergatogyne refers to any intermediate form between workers and standard gynes.
Ant colonies have a complex social structure. Ants’ jobs are determined and can be changed by age. As ants grow older their jobs move them farther from the queen, or center of the colony. Younger ants work within the nest protecting the queen and young. Sometimes, a queen is not present and is replaced by egg-laying workers.
"All worker ants are female. Males play only a minor role in ant colonies - mate once with the queen and then die," Frank said. So why do the ants do these amputations?
The workers of army ants are usually blind or can have compound eyes that are reduced to a single lens. There are species of army ants where the worker caste may show polymorphism based on physical differences and job allocations; however, there are also species that show no polymorphism at all. [5]
Worker policing is found in honey bees and other hymenopterans including some species of bumblebees, ants and wasps.. Worker policing is a behavior seen in colonies of social hymenopterans (ants, bees, and wasps) whereby worker females eat or remove eggs that have been laid by other workers rather than those laid by a queen.