The rebellion of the ant slaves

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The rebellion of the ant slaves

Category: Animal behaviour =95 Animal defences =95 Animals =95 Invertebrate=
s
Posted on: April 1, 2009 8:30 AM, by Ed Yong

Humans aren't the only species that have had to deal with the issue of
slavery. Some species of ants also abduct the young of others, forcing
them into labouring for their new masters. These slave-making ants,
like Protomagnathus americanus conduct violent raids on the nests of
other species, killing all the adults and larva-napping the brood.

When these youngsters mature, they take on the odour of their
abductors and become the servants of the enslaving queen. They take
over the jobs of maintaining the colony and caring for its larvae even
though they are from another species; they even take part in raids
themselves. But like all slave-traders, P.americanus faces
rebellions.

Some of its victims (ants from the genus Temnothorax) strike back with
murderous larvae. Alexandra Achenbach and Susanne Foitzik from Ludwig
Maximillians Universty in Munich found that some of the kidnapped
workers don't bow to the whims of their new queen. Once they have
matured, they start killing the pupae of their captors, destroying as
many as two-thirds of the colony's brood.

Ants that are targeted by slave-makers take massive hits to their
colonies and they are under intense pressure to resist these
marauders. But all the defences discovered so far happen before the
raids have been successfully completed. They involve better fighting
skills, quicker reaction times when enemies are spotted, hastier
escapes and so on.

Some scientists have suggested that strategies like this would be
impossible to develop because the enslaved workers are caught in an
evolutionary trap. Far away from their own colony, and sterile
themselves, there is no way for them to increase their reproductive
success. But Achenbach and Foitzik have rejected this idea - their
conclusion is that by conducting assassinations within their new home,
they severely reduce the slave-makers' numbers and their ability to
conduct raids. That safeguards the future of their relatives.

Achenbach and Foitzik collected 88 colonies of the slave-making
P.americanus ant that had abducted workers from three species of
Temnothorax. They found that the workers clearly care for the larvae,
and nearly all of them were raised until their pupated. But at that
point, the slaves' behaviour changed dramatically, taking on a more
homicidal bent ... (cont)

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