4 replies to this topic

[James C. Trager]

The authors found that two different species of fire ants produce winged queens with different amounts of stored fat in their abdomens. The fatter ones can't fly as far, but have greater success in solitary colony founding. The lighter ones fly farther, but appear to need to enter and get accepted into an existing colony of their species to successfully reproduce. http://journals.plos...al.pone.0153955

 

The study targeted  Solenopsis invicta & S. geminata but likely describes the situation for many other ant species, and probably is relevant to the evolution of parasitic colony founding. 

[dspdrew]

Makes sense.

[LC3]

Very interesting, I remember hearing something similar before. I think it was a  paper exploring the difference between polygynous species and monogynous species.

[antmaniac]

Interesting, that explained how I found different size of queens of the same species. The sugar ant queen has extreme large gaster compares to other ones I have seen.

[Teleutotje]

The article reminds me of the work of Pamilo, Rosengren and their collaborators in the 80's and begin 90's with Formica queens.... but they tried to find much more correlations....