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Ants don't have overlords. From the standpoint of genetics, one ant colony is a single organism. The queen mates only once in her life, before starting a colony

Ants don't have overlords. From the standpoint of genetics, one ant colony is a single organism. The queen mates only once in her life, before starting a colony. All the subsequent individual ants are from the genetic material of that foundational mating. When ants from different colonies meet (with different genetics lineages) they fight wars of total annihilation. Ant colonies do not cooperate.

eigenket 3y ago
This is a bit simplistic, especially the last paragraph. There are quite a lot of examples of ants which aren't particularly related to each other cooperating [1]. Probably the most common example is that colonies which have been around for a while and are stable often adopt new queens that turn up from outside. Then multiple queens are producing workers and you get a colony made of many distinct "families". There are even examples of nests consisting of ants from different species. Quoting from the article I referenced earlier > Ants engaged in parabiotic associations cooperate in a variety of ways including shared nest defense, trophallaxis, and communal use of trail pheromones. For example, “ant gardens” in the Neotropics (Davidson, 1988; Orivel et al., 1997) and in Asian rainforests (Kaufmann and Maschwitz, 2006; Menzel and Bluthgen, 2010) are often co-inhabited by species from the genera Crematogaster and Camponotus (along with a number of other genera) .... While brood chambers are kept separate, the rest of the colonies mix freely within the joint nest. In addition to sharing foraging trails to plant-based resources (Menzel et al., 2010), both species will defend the nest although larger Camponotus tend to exhibit the majority of the defensive behaviors (Menzel and Bluthgen, 2010). [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.736757/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.73675...

eigenket 3y ago

This is a bit simplistic, especially the last paragraph. There are quite a lot of examples of ants which aren't particularly related to each other cooperating [1]. Probably the most common example is that colonies which have been around for a while and are stable often adopt new queens that turn up from outside. Then multiple queens are producing workers and you get a colony made of many distinct "families". There are even examples of nests consisting of ants from different species. Quoting from the article I referenced earlier > Ants engaged in parabiotic associations cooperate in a variety of ways including shared nest defense, trophallaxis, and communal use of trail pheromones. For example, “ant gardens” in the Neotropics (Davidson, 1988; Orivel et al., 1997) and in Asian rainforests (Kaufmann and Maschwitz, 2006; Menzel and Bluthgen, 2010) are often co-inhabited by species from the genera Crematogaster and Camponotus (along with a number of other genera) .... While brood chambers are kept separate, the rest of the colonies mix freely within the joint nest. In addition to sharing foraging trails to plant-based resources (Menzel et al., 2010), both species will defend the nest although larger Camponotus tend to exhibit the majority of the defensive behaviors (Menzel and Bluthgen, 2010). [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.736757/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.73675...