Young queens of leafcutter ants change roles if they cannot reproduce
Friday, September 14, 2012 - 14:31
in Biology & Nature
Biologists from the universities of Freiburg and Copenhagen, Denmark, have discovered that queens of the ant genus Acromyrmex are flexible in the event that they cannot found their own colony. The queens of other species die as soon as they can no longer fulfill their life's task. The unsuccessful Acromyrmex queens, on the other hand, change their entire repertoire of behavior and help defend and tend to their mother colony, as the scientists report in the current online issue of the journal Current Biology.