MATING comes at a price even queens must pay.
A young leaf-cutting ant queen will gamble her own health for the chance to reproduce successfully in the long term.
It’s a high-risk strategy: in only a few hours, the queen must mate and store hundreds of millions of live sperm to use for the rest of her 30-year lifespan - all of which weakens her immune system.
Then she must found her colony, exposing herself to all sorts of pathogens in the soil.
“If females mate too often and/or store too much sperm, they are unable to up-regulate their immune systems,” says Boris Baer at the centre for social evolution at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
When Baer and colleagues stimulated queens’ immune systems and measured the response, they found that it decreased with the amount of sperm the ants stored (Nature, vol 441, p 872).
This is critical, because more than 95 per cent of queens do not survive the initial colony-founding phase, mainly because of parasite attacks.
Still, death is a risk worth taking to ensure successful reproduction in the long term, Baer says.
From issue 2556 of New Scientist magazine, 17 June 2006, page 22.
Leaf-cutting (and other) ants and fungi: here.
Systematic study of fungi since the seventeenth century: here.
Ants’ Olympic jumps caught on tape:
New high-speed videoclips show how certain ants
manage to jump 40 times their own length.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/060821_antjump.htm
Comment by Administrator — August 30, 2006 @ 8:27 am