Illuminating the evolution of social parasite ants
Published:23 Mar.2023 Source:Rockefeller University
Ants are known as hard workers, tirelessly attending to their assigned tasks -- foraging for food, nurturing larvae, digging tunnels, tidying the nest. But in truth, some are total layabouts. Called workerless social parasites, these rare species exist only as queens, and they die without workers to tend to them. To survive, parastic ants infiltrate a colony of closely related ants, where, as long as they keep their numbers relatively low, they and their offspring become the leisure class of the colony.
It's long been thought that these determinedly lazy insects likely evolved their queenly characteristics one by one, through a series of mutations, in an isolated setting. Now scientists in the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at The Rockefeller University, together with their collaborators at Harvard University, have a new theory. As they report in Current Biology, they've discovered queen-like mutants -- parasitic ants that spontaneously appeared in colonies of clonal raider ants, which are typically queenless.
"This mutant is like the precursor to other parasitic species," says Waring Trible, lead author of the study. "It's a new way of understanding how ants evolve to become socially parasitic."