The Strangest Things in the World: A Book About Extraordinary Manifestations of NatureHenry, Thomas R. (Thomas Robert)
History
The Strangest Things in the World: A Book About Extraordinary Manifestations of Nature
Henry, Thomas R. (Thomas Robert)
Animal behavior; Natural history
There is a new lot of larvae every 33 days—all workers or incompletely
developed females. Development is restricted by the amount of food
available. Since each brood consists of about 60,000 individuals, a
colony theoretically might reach titanic proportions. However, it does
little more than maintain its population. The death rate of soldier
ants, in constant combat, is very heavy.
Once each year, at the start of the dry season in the tropics, a colony
queen produces a sexual brood of about 3,000 males and six queens. The
rest of the 60,000 eggs laid at this time are incapable of hatching and
are fed to the new-born sexed individuals. They apparently have some of
the nutritious properties of the royal jelly fed to queen bees.
This sexual brood is produced in what has been called a statory period
in which the army maintains a fixed bivouac for about three weeks.
During this time the new queens develop and around at least one of them
a new group of workers, about half the whole, tends to congregate. A
strange antagonism seems to develop between the old and new groups.
Eventually the colony divides in two and each half starts moving in
opposite directions. The other new queens are lost in the shuffle.
Most of the newly developed males are ‘excess baggage.’ During the
winged, or mating, stage they fly into the forest where the great
majority of them are eaten by birds. When the surviving ants light on a
tree, on the ground or on some other object, the wings drop off. Then
they apparently wander about aimlessly until they come to an army ant
trail which they recognize by the odor and follow it until they come to
the colony which has made it. If this happens to be a colony of their
own relatives, they probably are killed by the workers. If it happens
to be an entirely foreign colony, they may be accepted. This apparently
is one of nature’s mechanisms for intruding new genes into a strain.
The raiding activities of a colony are carried out during the day from
a central headquarters. During the daytime raiding individuals return
to the colony from their forays and by dusk all have returned. At
night the bivouac is changed, the whole colony moving forward along
one of the trails blazed by the raiders. A new headquarters is thus
established. A colony moves from six to seven hours before striking a
new bivouac. Not infrequently, if no promising site is found, it moves
from dusk to dawn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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