Incredible reality of how ant queens safeguard their colonies—by not simply eating but instead eating up their ill posterity, training them forever to reestablish her ripe fortune.
Sacrifice for Survival
But in the natural cruelty of the insect world, ant queens must reckon with an unbelievable decision: to care for their offspring or eat them. Now a new study from the University of Oxford has explained just what these fabulous queens do to save their colonies.
An ant queen starting a colony is like a galley up on blocks in the middle of shipyard with no means of defense against disease. But it is her brood, the young larvae that are the secret to the success of a colony. The queen, however, goes to extreme measures to save her brood when they get sick. Instead of feeding ailing broods, she ate her own children alive —reprocessing their nutrients and converting them into new, more vigorous eggs.
They then presented founding queens with larvae that had been infected by a lethal fungal pathogen. Amazingly, selected queens consumed 92% of the infected larvae within minutes of being presented to them. This “hygienic cannibalism” is brutal but effective in helping the colony to suppress the threat of possible diseases, and to preserve the colony.
Babygate: The Colony Must Stand
With a human eye this seems so cruel, but all of the well-fed queens just have to make sure their unborn empires (and small fledgling colonies) are well cared for. In their first workers, the queens are effectively ‘refusing to feed themselves’ in order to generate more workers — and worker number is paramount for colony issues.
Queens consuming infected larvae and allows them to effectively recycle essential resources otherwise lost to these parasites back into the generation of uninfected brood. This serves to both limit the spread of disease as well as conserve resources that would otherwise be spent on offspring destined for death.
Queens that partook in this “hygienic cannibalism” were then observed to lay 55% more eggs than those from the non-cannibalizing group. This shows the clear reproductive advantage of this merciless, albeit practical practice.
Funnily enough, only queens display this behavior compared to mature worker ants. One explanation for this discrepancy could be since worker ants can remove and kill infected larvae, where the queens are locked into their nests during early stages of colony establishment.
Conclusion
What this study shows is the extreme measures of sacrifice that ant queens are willing to make in order to keep their colony strong and effective. These tough queens are able to provide their colonies with the best chance of surviving the lethal diseases, by sacrificing surrounded sick off-spring in order to re-utilize these valuable nutrients. This extreme case of maternal care is a striking example of how insects have evolved incredibly inventive strategies to cope with the demands of harsh environments.
