From the Same Ant Species, Different Behavior
By Louis Jacobson	click to view

For more than a century, scientists have known that certain species of ants subsist by raiding other ant colonies and turning their offspring into slaves. But researchers have known relatively little about how these "slavemaking" ants actually operate in the wild -- until now.

Joan M. Herbers, a biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and her laboratory colleague Susanne Foitzik have spent the past few years studying ant colonies near Albany, N.Y., and White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. At each location, Herbers and Foitzik observed one slavemaking species -- known as Protomognathus americanus -- as well as the one or two species it enslaved. The enslaved species all belong to the genus Leptothorax.

What Herbers and Foitzik discovered is that the enslaver ants in West Virginia behaved much differently than the enslaver ants in New York -- even though the ants in both locations belonged to the same species. In turn, the enslaved ants in West Virginia also behaved differently than did those in New York.

Peter Nonacs, a biologist at the University of California at Los Angeles who calls Herbers's work "solid" and "interesting," notes that slavemaking ants interest scientists because they practice several noteworthy behaviors. Ants, like humans, are social animals, with large numbers of individuals alternately cooperating and fighting with one another, Nonacs said. In addition, few species aside from humans take slaves (or, to be precise, domesticate another species for their own benefit, as the ants do).

Herbers's findings also provide new insights into how parasitic species behave and evolve. Parasitic behavior has attracted a great deal of interest recently because it sheds light on many human scourges, from mosquitoes to the influenza virus.   Full Story

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Invader Ants Hurting Ecosystems, Economies

By John Roach
for National Geographic News

When merchant ships embarked from the shores of Brazil and Argentina in the early 1900s to carry coffee and sugar to South Africa, North America, and the Mediterranean, they carried a mischievous stowaway: Linepithema humile. 

The tiny black insect, better known as the Argentine ant, used burgeoning global trade to invade ant communities around the world. Scientists are just now beginning to tally the damage. The reports are grim. Entire native ant populations have disappeared. 

Full Story 

From the Antcolony
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Question
how do i get a red ant queen without having to dig up nest? will any red winged ant or one of the workers turn into a queen? if the worker or soldier turns queen how do i make them turn queen? i cant find any winged ants and i dont want to dig up nest, anyway how to get queen?

Response
Best advice is to wait till mating season. The winged ants you see in a colony are unmated queens and drones. As for waiting for a worker to become a queen, it will never happen with harvester ants if that is the kind of red ant you are talking about. 

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