Little calving to keep the throne

If faced with the risk of being destroyed by "people", the queen is forced to sacrifice the rights of the herd to maintain their position.

If the herd has many queen ants, the worker ant will destroy them until only one lord survives.Photo: flickr.com.

The ant nest works like a giant body. Princess ants produce worker ants to meet the needs of lords and other members of the team.

Livescience said, usually an ant nest has more than one queen. Of course two or three princesses will produce more worker ants than one. Due to the large 'workforce', the herd survival ability will increase. But the queen ants can't live together forever, because the worker ants won't leave it like that. At some point the worker ants will rush into the gods and slaughter them until there is only one god left. In many cases, there are no ants surviving.

'Worker ants are much smaller than princess ants. Each worker ant only causes minor injuries when they attack. So the worker ants must bite and inject acid into the body of the ants for many days to destroy them. Many queens die because of thirst, not because of wounds. In most cases, worker ants stop attacking when only one lord survives, but sometimes they kill all gods, ' Luke Holman, a Copenhagen University scientist in Denmark, told Livescience. .

According to Holman, if the ants kill all ants, it is a suicide action in terms of evolution, because worker ants cannot reproduce. They depend on the queen in maintaining the race.

But Holman and colleagues found that gods found a wise way - though somewhat selfish - to maintain life and power: they lay fewer worker ants if there were other queens in the nest. The larger the number of children that queen queens produce, the more energy they lose. Therefore, the strategy of giving birth less helps the princess to have enough strength to fight the workers ants. Of course, the number of worker ants decreases, the growth speed of the team is also slower.

But the worker ants are not foolish, because they can detect the gods that give birth to fewer children through the smell. In fact, the queen ant always secretes chemicals to create body odor. The higher the ants' fertility ants, the stronger their body odor. Holman found that in many cases, worker ants executed princess ants after discovering that she gave birth to fewer children.

'Destroying the most selfish gods is a way for worker ants to force the remaining gods to have more children to maintain the herd's existence. Perhaps the rule of this elementary behavior has helped species to create highly cooperative societies, just like human society, ' Holman remarked.

Holman's research was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B recently.