4 replies to this topic

[Roachant]

Hi all,
I read somewhere that ants from the same colony have fights from time to time. The problem is I can't remember where I read it. Can anyone confirm if this is true?
Don

[LC3]

The only thing I can remember mentioning that is on an old topic you made where Crystals said something about her Myrmica colonies.

http://www.formicult...aviour-you-saw/

 

Plus drew's Acromyrmex civil war... Not sure where that was posted though.

[Roachant]

I remember she mentioning that, I didn't know about the Acromyrmex civil war. Ants are more alike to us than I thought, in terms of behaviour.

[Crystals]

Although they have brough cooperation to a high level, most social insects will fight amonst themselves.

 

Ants will fight amongst themselves, and the same goes for bees.

They all look like they get along, and for the most part they succeed quite well.  In bee hives they have "police" bees, and one of their main tasks is to ensure that other workers don't lay eggs.  The same goes for ants (or at least a few species that were mentioned in several studies).

 

There was a study done on eggs a queen laid, and eggs the workers laid, and how many survived to the worker/alate stage.  Depending on the resources available, and the number of "police ants", the results varied by quite a large margin especially for the production of male alates.

 

This study was covered in a free course called animal behavior through coursera.org in weeks 7 & 8, mostly in the lecture "Conflict in social insects".  It credits quite a few studies, "Conflict Resolution in Insect Societies" (Annual review of entomology Vol. 51 (2006) 581-608 by Ratnieks, L. W., K. R. & Wenseleers, T.)

Ponerine ant was specifically mentioned in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. vol. 271 pp. 1427-1434.

Several other species & studies are also listed, and if people really want, I can post them.

 

I have seen fighting occasionally in my colonies. I see it more often in Myrmica, and other species with 2 nodes like Leptothorax once colonies get larger.  I saw it once or twice in my Camponotus colonies, where one worker was suddenly ganged up on and killed by several other workers, or sometimes just really roughed up.

I see it quite a bit with queens of parasitic species that I boosted.  My Formica ulkei colony was the worst I ever encountered for boosted workers fighting and brood eating, I recorded most of it in their journal.

[Mdrogun]

Do colonies with sterile workers fight as much, or do they not fight at all?