- Carillon
- May 9, 2014
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Oh yes! This is called social parasitism and is incredibly complex and as old as eusocialitiy. There is no biological realm where parasites do not exist, as they are as old as life itself.
Basically there are three strategies involved: In Strategy 1, violence, a pregnant queen enters an existing ant colony, disguised as a normal worker, and compels via pheromones or forces via violence the actual colony workers to leave her be, kill the existing queen ant and start laying eggs, who as soon as they hatch fight the other workers, steal their food and forcefully takeover the colony.
In strategy 2, fraud, a pregnant queen disguises herself as another queen of the same colony and sneaks in. She lives next to the other queen and acts like her, but spreads a pheromone that makes her more appealing to serve than the actual queen, until the latter will die off starvation and in general being neglected, or the existing workers even kill their own original mommy to serve the parasite. The parasite lays eggs constantly and gets them raised by the victim workers, until they grow up, outnumber the original (obviously not anymore growing) worker population and take over the entire colony by killing the remaining victim ants. A
Strategy 3, true parasitism, is the most complex and brutal one and only accessible for a few very special ant species. Those species are lacking a worker caste all together, they are exclusively made out of queens and males, nothing else will ever be born.
A pregnant queen is able to become virtually invisible for the victim ants via extremely complex pheromones and just walks into the victim colony. She searches for the or one of the existing queens and hooks herself up to her back, pushing her onto the ground and hindering her movement. Via chemicals she forces the workers to feed and take care of her, always making sure the original queen is staying out of the picture, but always still alive. She then can start laying eggs for baby queens and males which get taken care of by the existing workers and spread her genome that way. The males will meet with new queens and the cycle repeats itself.
Those parasitic queens no longer have legs or even a mouth, they can only move for a certain time by crawling like a worm and will stay on the back of the victim for the rest of their lives. They are so successful at being parasites that they were able to reduce almost all functions that enable them to take care of themselves and require a host to survive.
I made a more detailed post about social parasites in my byob thread, feel free to check it out if you want to be scared what nature can evolve to and for some nasty pictures of an ant species so parasitic that they are unable to exist without their hosts: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3886441&pagenumber=5&perpage=40#post494310981
In strategy 1 and 2 why then kill off the remaining workers? If they're already serving the parasitic queen why not keep them around indefinitely?
Also how effective are those chemicals? What's the chance they're detected or it doesn't work?
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Jul 7, 2020 23:59
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