Risks when the queen is a mother

Mating means paying the price, even if it is a queen. The young princesses of the leaf-cutting ants must play their health gamble in exchange for a long-term chance of reproduction.

Princess ant and worker ants ( Source: whyfiles )

It's a very dangerous strategy: in just a few hours, the queen must pair and store hundreds of millions of sperms enough to last for the rest of her 30 years - and all weaken the immune system. its. After that, the princess must establish the nest and reveal herself to all kinds of pathogens in the soil.

" If children mate too often and store too many sperm, they cannot regulate their immune systems, " said Boris Baer at the center of social evolution at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

When Baer and his colleagues stimulated the queen's immune system and measured response, they found that the response decreased as the amount of sperm that ants stored increased.

This is very important, because more than 95% of queen ants do not survive the first phase of the nesting process, mainly due to the parasite attack.

" If you pair too much, you tend to die early. That's why ' nuns ' live long, " said Mike Siva, a biologist at the University of Sheffield.

T. An