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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.
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 ]
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.
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.
The pavement ant is dark brown to blackish, and 2.5–4 millimeters (0.10–0.16 in) long. A colony is composed of workers, alates, and a queen. Workers do have a small stinger, which can cause mild discomfort in humans but is essentially harmless. Alates, or new queen ants and drones, have wings, and are at least twice as large as the workers ...
The term ergatoid has been used to denote wingless reproductive ants since Margaret Holliday's 1903 paper, "A study of a few ergatogynic ants", although its current usage was suggested and more completely defined in the 1991 paper, "Ergatoid queens and intercastes in ants: two distinct adult forms which look morphologically intermediate between workers and winged queens", by C.P. Peeters. [1]
The queen inhabits one of these nests while the others are used by the worker ants to live in and care for the brood. The ants occupy a three dimensional territory in the treetops, driving off other ants of their own or other species aggressively, and usually creating a "no-ants-land" where the territory abuts on that of another colony.
Carebara diversa is a eusocial insect and individuals have continuous allometric variation in size and morphology to facilitate task allocation and partitioning of work. Minor workers are between 1.3 and 2.5 mm in length, but major workers are much larger. Between the smallest minor and largest major workers there are many intermediate forms.