Diamond Member Pelican Press 0 Posted March 22, 2024 Diamond Member Share Posted March 22, 2024 Ant queens have good reasons for eating their own ******* A ****** garden ant colony in its nest with a few eggs, pupae, larvae and a large queen Nik Bruining/Shutterstock When ****** garden ant queens notice their young are *****, they eat them before the illness spreads to the rest of the nest. A cannibal queen may not win any “mother of the year” awards, but the strategy could be an effective way to protect her kingdom, research suggests. The findings provide insights into the evolution of “filial cannibalism”, the practice of parents consuming their offspring. Ants and other colony-dwelling social insects can thwart the spread of ********* by having workers self-isolate when ***** or by removing infected nestmates. These “social immunity” duties are well known, write This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up and This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up at the University of Oxford. But ant queens start their colonies alone, so how do they defend against ******** as they establish and grow a nest? To find out, Bizzell and Pull collected newly mated ****** garden ant (Lasius ******) queens and brought them into the lab. Once the ants started laying eggs and establishing fledgling colonies, the researchers took the larvae away from the queens and exposed some of them to spores of the lethal Metarhizium *******, which infects wild ant nests. After those larvae had time to develop infections that would become fatal, but were not yet contagious, the team returned all the larvae to their mother. The queens ate 92 per cent of their ***** young, but only 6 per cent of the uninfected larvae, showing they could detect the infection and intervene. Failing to catch the infection could have disastrous consequences. When the team exposed colonies to very infectious larval cadavers sprouting with spore-producing fungi, all the broods *****. And only 20 percent of the queens survived, even after they sprayed the corpses with acidic, antimicrobial venom. Despite these risks, the queens that eat their infected larvae seem to avoid harm. The queens may be swallowing their own antimicrobial venom to make their guts hostile to fungal spores, the researchers suggest. They base this conclusion on This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up and the team’s observations of queens grooming their venom ****** openings. “If the queen gets infected and *****, the colony *****,” says This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, since she is the only reproductive individual. So, it makes sense that an evolved strategy for dealing with ******** would emphasise the survival of the queen. Eating the ***** ******* yields other benefits too. The researchers found queens that ate their ***** young went on to lay 55 per cent more eggs than those that didn’t, suggesting they had recycled those caloric resources. This advantage, plus the removal of ******** risk, might illustrate a way filial cannibalism could evolve in some species, the researchers argue. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up at the University of Tours in France wonders if offspring hatched after their older siblings are eaten have immune systems that better protect against the fungal infection. If so, proving this could reveal “dual benefits” of filial cannibalism, for both mother and offspring. The findings suggest the behaviours necessary for caring for young and for ******** protection in fledgling colonies overlap. As a result, Bizzell and Pull argue that worker ants’ ********-preventing behaviour could have evolved from the kind of generalised parental care seen in many types of insects. Topics: This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up animals,cannibalism,insects #Ant #queens #good #reasons #eating #******* This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Link to comment https://hopzone.eu/forums/topic/6134-ant-queens-have-good-reasons-for-eating-their-own-babies/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
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