Ant Queens - Formicidable Posers
I reckon ant queens know how to strut their stuff. Take a look at these images and tell me that they’re not posing. Thrust out abdomens, accentuated waists, head inclined just so, pouts almost. Tell me it’s not true.
I guess they have much to be proud of, or alternatively, if they are just starting out on their colony forming journey (or thereabouts), much to look forward to. Queen ants are, of course, all female, as are the workers the queen’s produce, regardless of whether there is caste differentiation in the colony or not; caste differentiation refers to differences in workers that may serve contrasting functions - big worker ‘soldiers’ and little workers, for example. Some ants don’t have any differentiation - all workers are the same size. As a matter of fact it can get quite complex, so let’s not go there today.
In comparison to worker ants, which we might commonly see in our everyday lives, queens are generally hidden away. They have a distinctive thorax structure, among other morphological and physiological differences. This thorax structure reflects that fact that all these queens (perhaps not the Amblypone at the top) once possessed wings and could fly, have lost them, and now live inside the nest producing eggs. You might also note that these queens all have three little ‘dots’ on the top middle of their head - these are ocelli, sensory organs (like eyes) that contribute to navigation and orientation. Males have them, often big ones. Workers generally don’t.
Here, in these pictures, in the middle of their thorax you can actually see the complex ‘fittings’ where the wing was once attached, before it fell off after the nupital flight; workers lack this complex thorax structure because they don’t ever have wings. The nupital flight is the flight made by colony reproductives (the males and queens) that results in mating and colony formation - for the lucky few. For most (queens and males) it results in death from predators like birds, bats, or spiders, from environmental stress (drowning, heat, cold etc.) or even car crashes - that’s ants crashing into cars...right.
Nupital flights can be impressive - I’m sure many of you have seen this in summer, with ‘white ant’ swarms, actually termites, and perhaps ants too. The ant worker Mortimer Wheeler published (1916: The Journal of Animal Behavior 6, 70-73) a description of a mass nupital flight of Australian bulldog ants, recorded by the wonderfully named Australian entomologist, W.W. Froggatt. The paper is gorgeously titled “The Marriage-flight of a Bull-dog Ant” (sort of like Mozart meets Korsakov with Marriage of Figaro crossed with the Flight of the Bumblebee). I digress. I’ve reproduced the relevant bit below. It’s worth a read but bear in mind these Myrmecia are well over 25 mm (1 inch) in length and they sting, hard (& Chevy Chase is a place, apparently):
"On January 30th, after some very hot, stormy weather, while I was at Chevy Chase, near Armidale, N. S. W., I crossed the paddock and climbed to the top of Mt. Roul, an isolated, flat-topped, basaltic hill, which rises about 300 feet above the surrounding open, cleared country. The summit, about half an acre in extent, is covered with low "black- thorn" bushes (Bursaria). I saw no signs of bull-dog ant nests till I reached the summit. Then I was enveloped in a regular cloud of the great winged ants. They were out in thousands and thousands, resting on the rocks and grass. The air was full of them, but they were chiefly flying in great numbers about the bushes where the males were copulating with the females. As soon as a male (and there were apparently hundreds of males to every female) captured a female on a bush, other males surrounded the couple till there was a struggling mass of ants forming a ball- as 'big as one's fist’. Then something seemed to give way, the ball would fall to the ground and the ants would scatter. As many as half a dozen of these balls would keep forming on every little bush and this went on throughout the morning. I was a bit frightened at first but the ants took no notice of me, as the males were all so eager in their endeavors to seize the females."
The thought of a dozen balls of Myrmecia as big as my fist gives me shudders because I’ve witnessed this stage of the bull ants life - certainly not to the extent of the above description, but in numbers to give me pause. Unlike Froggatt I wasn’t so lucky because I got 7 worth-it stings; it was a very memorable occasion and I’d really love to see the air full of them! Stings or no stings, no stings attached.
Bring on a Billion-Bull-Dog-Ant Nupital Flight, Please?
