ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2010
Colony fusion and worker reproduction after queen loss in army ants.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- DNA Barcode Reference Library for European Ants: A Roadmap for Phylogeography and Species Discovery.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- From inter-group conflict to inter-group cooperation: insights from social insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- The early life of a leaf-cutter ant colony constrains symbiont vertical transmission and favors horizontal transmission.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Queen loss increases worker survival in leaf-cutting ants under paraquat-induced oxidative stress.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The evolution of eusociality: no risk-return tradeoff but the ecology matters.Ecology letters · 2020Article
- Nice to kin and nasty to non-kin: revisiting Hamilton's early insights on eusociality.Biology letters · 2013Article
- Colony fusion in a parthenogenetic ant, Pristomyrmex punctatus.Journal of insect science (Online) · 2013Article
- Hybridization in East African swarm-raiding army ants.Frontiers in zoology · 2011Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Theory predicts that altruism is only evolutionarily stable if it is preferentially directed towards relatives, so that any such behaviour towards seemingly unrelated individuals requires scrutiny. Queenless army ant colonies, which have anecdotally been reported to fuse with queenright foreign colonies, are such an enigmatic case. Here we combine experimental queen removal with population genetics and cuticular chemistry analyses to show that colonies of the African army ant Dorylus molestus frequently merge with neighbouring colonies after queen loss. Merging colonies often have no direct co-ancestry, but are on average probably distantly related because of overall population viscosity. The alternative of male production by orphaned workers appears to be so inefficient that residual inclusive fitness of orphaned workers might be maximized by indiscriminately merging with neighbouring colonies to increase their reproductive success. We show that worker chemical recognition profiles remain similar after queen loss, but rapidly change into a mixed colony Gestalt odour after fusion, consistent with indiscriminate acceptance of alien workers that are no longer aggressive. We hypothesize that colony fusion after queen loss might be more widespread, especially in spatially structured populations of social insects where worker reproduction is not profitable.
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Registered trials
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