Ant Rants

13/09/2023

Using my newly constructed macro imaging setup - a pretty cool device that I call 'AntScanner3000' or 'The Discernment', depending on mood and level of Seriousness™, I did an experiment scanning this particular ant I found - a miniaturised Formica sp. queen found in my local neighborhood, in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden.

This video is stitched together from 4320 separate photos.

11 photos were taken at each degree of rotation, at approximately 1mm intervals. Then the sharp parts of those photos were put together into 360 composite images, forming a full lapse with the entire ant in focus.

These 360 images were then put in sequence and turned into a video.

This video was then processed through one round of detail recovery / resolution enhancement / denoise / deblur using an AI model, followed by three rounds of frame interpolation, in order to smoothen the rotation. Having just the original 360 frames felt kinda choppy.

This is the first viable result I have gotten out of the process. I am still experimenting to make the most of my newly built tools so you will see more of this type of stuff, and probably in better quality, in the future.

This footage should be good enough to get a species-level ID or at least get close to one. This queen is thus far unidentified, and I am failing to key it to any local species.

Ant is approximately 6mm in length and is superficially similar to a F. cinerea worker. Thorax is that of a queen though, and when she was first captured, she was winged, although the wings were removed by host workers during a failed attempt at parasitic introduction. (Don't worry, I got good footage of her winged as well)

Form implies heavily that this is a parasite. She is similar to queens of the nearctic Microgyna species group, but the find is strange, because I am not in the New World.

So far I am just calling this Formica sp. "wtf".

I have never seen a similar ant queen. Thus, I am in the process of making a proper and formal description of the specimen.

As I have never done actual and proper taxonomy before, I wanna low-key reach out to people who are actual academics, which I am not, for some assistance. I am a total amateur (but very nerdy) and have zero experience in academia.

13/04/2022

Some stills I screenshotted from a 4k video Tobias sent me. He's roaming about, trying out his new cool camera equipment.

Even just screencaps of this film approach macro photo quality imho. This summer some ants sure are getting filmed.

Pictured: Formica rufa on their mound, in a suburb of Stockholm. They are currently getting the colony started for the year, and rebuilding the parts of their mound that have collapsed during winter.

They have to get ready for their yearly nuptial, which is held uncommonly early in the year - in May to early June.

I am still waiting for my *photogenic* ant nests. It will probably be a couple of weeks before they arrive.

My current setups pretty much still all look like lab experiments. This is why I don't show them more.

But I'm getting both new, more natural-looking nests quite soon, as well as the the equipment I need to start my ant slow-tv live feed.

13/04/2022

Swedish science journalist and myrmecologist Katja Bargum showing off one of my ant colonies on Swedish TV channel TV4.

I imagine this experience in the national limelight will turn my Campos into total divas. They will probably stop accepting normal mealworms, and instead they will demand royal jelly.

12/04/2022

Some fun news - if you're in Sweden, tune in to TV4 Nyhetsmorgon tomorrow and you'll see my ant colonies.

A local ant expert is releasing a new book about ants and she's getting interviewed on TV. The production company wanted some live ant colonies to show, and I lent them three small live colonies and a pinned Dinomyrmex.

I dunno yet how much will be shown, but hopefully my ants will not turn into total divas now

09/04/2022

A founding queen of Camponotus ligniperda, Europe's largest ant, with her nanitic brood, next to a framed major worker of Dinomyrmex gigas - the largest (heaviest) ant species in the world.

Yeah, the label says 'Camponotus gigas' - Both these species used to be counted to the same genus. However, I guess the taxonomists thought "The terrifying giant ant" was a more appropriate name for this gentle giant. Notice that even a worker of this huge species makes the 2 cm queen next to her, look positively tiny.

Dinomyrmex gigas, by the way, display several super-interesting behaviours.

They solve species-internal turf disputes through bloodless display battles at the territorial borders, and during dry season, they collect feathers and stick them in the dirt around their nest entrances, to collect droplets of morning dew.

One of my dreams is owning a colony of these exotic giant ants, but for now I am very happy with the slightly smaller giants I already have.

08/04/2022

I've been silent for a little while, but not inactive.

Just wanna tell you some really cool news! I have been commissioned, together with my very good macro-photographer friend Tobias Wallin, to assist in the production of a (very) short documentary for kids about Formica rufa wood ants. This mini-documentary will be aired as part of a series of similar documentaries, on Swedish state TV, during the fall and winter.

Tobias will shoot a lot of cool, close-up macro video for the film - he's gotten his hands on quite awesome camera tech - and I will provide ant knowledge, assist in the field, and also help develop and fact-check the manuscript. Apart from this, I will also provide one of my captive colonies for filming "in-nest" scenes.

My small, captive F. rufa-colony founded the summer of 2020, will be featured, in a Tarheel Ants nest, together with a lot of scenes from nature.

My ants will be movie stars. Wow!

I'll provide more info later, and of course I will link to the finished production when it's released, sometime during late fall or early winter.

About the video in this post: This is the very F. rufa colony that will be featured in the "inside the nest" shots of the documentary.

Notice the compact shape of the queen. Not at all like a thicc, bumbling Lasius claustral. She is almost shaped like a worker, only slightly larger. The lumpy thorax is really the only really obvious sign of her status as queen.

Workerlike morphology is a telltale sign the species has a parasitic method of founding. Compare with, for example, Lasius umbratus, which belongs to another genus, but has similar proportions and a very similar (temporarily socially parasitic) method of colony founding. The similarity in body proportions is striking. Form follows function.

You might also be wondering - is this colony from 2020? Is that not a _very_ small colony for having existed for so long?

And yes. That is correct. Formica rufa queens usually lay no eggs until they have hibernated for one winter with their F. fusca hosts. So laying, in this colony, started last spring, and the host workers were completely replaced by the first generation of F. rufa over the course of 2021. The last F. fusca workers died during winter, and this spring, the only ants left in the colony are F. rufa.

Right now, this colony is at the point where it will soon take off, population-wise. Hopefully they will reach the hundreds before the year is over.

This colony currently lives in a tube setup, but they will be moved to a more picturesque location - a slightly modified Tarheel Ants nest, that I will make as similar to a natural chamber as I can. I am also going to be upgrading my (rather amateurish) photo equipment in preparation for this project.

31/01/2022

Here’s a new update on the replacement host ant queen I grafted into the Tetramorium colony that hosts my Strongylognathus parasites. A lot of people asked me to update when something happened with this colony, so here we go!

Original thread: https://www.facebook.com/antrants/posts/108835391696152

TL:DR; of what happened so far:

- I have a rare colony of parasitic ants (Strongylognathus testaceus), and their hosts are a colony of another, closely related ant species (Tetramorium caespitum)

- These parasites are a separate colony-within-the-colony and they live together with their hosts. These parasite ants do no productive work, and make up just 1-2% of the total population.

- The host queen is controlled by the parasite queen’s pheromonal propaganda. Because of this, the host queen produces only workers and no alates (queens and drones), and her colony treats the alien parasites as full members of the colony, sharing their food with them, and caring for the parasite brood.

- The parasite queen produces a lot of its own alates, but almost no workers, and these workers do nothing to help out in the colony. These parasites eat the host food and they breed at the host’s expense, spending all resources that would otherwise go to host reproduction.

- BUT my host queen died unexpectedly, leaving the parasite queen with no supplier of future workforce. The parasite queen is rare, interesting and expensive, and I really don’t want to lose her.

- The lack of a host queen, in the long term, will kill my parasite colony since there are no new worker ants and the parasites can't do actual work. If you want a rhyme for this, it's "A parasite cannot survive unless its host remains alive".

- As Tetramorium caespitum is a monogynous species, queen introductions are difficult, and often the host workers will treat the new queen as an invader and kill her. New queens being adopted into a Tetramorium colony does not happen in nature. The situation I was in, basically says that the parasite colony is doomed to die.

- In the last thread, I did tricky and unnatural things as a somewhat desperate attempt to introduce a new host queen to this colony, and I hoped she would be accepted by both the parasite and the host workers.

- My method of doing this was experimental, although similar things are commonly done in beekeeping:

1. I let the host colony go without a host queen for two months, so they lost their colony smell. Parasite queen was still present in the colony, of course.

2. I put both the new host queen, and the host colony, into forced hibernation, in separate containers inside my refrigerator.
3. While both colonies were chilled to passivity, the new host queen was tapped into the queen-less colony.

4. The newly combined colony was put back into the refrigerator for some time, so the ants got to know each other, while being too cold to be able to act aggressively.

5. A week ago, when checking on the colony, I saw trophallaxis between the newly introduced host queen, and one of the workers, meaning that it is very likely that she had been successfully adopted.

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So here comes the latest update:

After noticing an irregular worker die-off in the chilled tube (3 workers dead overnight) I brought them out of hibernation somewhat prematurely, as it seemed their nutrition reserves were getting low. I had originally planned on 3 weeks hibernation after the introductions, but in the end, I settled for two weeks for this reason.

I have had the colony out of the refrigerator for two and a half days now, and still there are no signs whatsoever of aggression between the host workers and the new host queen - and not between the new queen and the parasites either.

All parties seem to have settled in just fine, and there are no signs of aggression, exiling or self-isolation by any party. Any of these would have been very bad signs. The ants are all talking to each other, cooperating, and sharing food.

The new host queen has taken up the “queen position”, which means she sits on top of, or burrowed into, the pile of brood. In ant society, the position on top of the pile of kids is akin to a throne, and you will always find the queen of a colony in a similar position.

She is regularly polished and fed by the workers, just as she would have been if she was their natural queen.

The parasite is always close by, and she seems to have successfully convinced the new host queen that she and her non-productive alien offspring belongs in the colony, just as she managed to convince the last one.

In short, they all now believe they are indeed a single colony, instead of three colonies combined (host queen, host workers, parasite colony).

I can therefore conclude that this attempt at queen grafting has been 100% successful, despite the monogyne nature of the Tetramorium hosts. And so, my rare parasites are safe for now.

I know of nobody else who has done this with a permanently parasitised colony before, so IF this is indeed new ground I’m breaking (not sure actually lol) my conclusion is that this is indeed possible, and that this method might constitute a functional way of perpetuating the host colony of a permanent inquiline like S. testaceus. Such methods could be useful in lab settings where the death of a host queen may otherwise put a premature stop to the study of a hosted parasite.

Photos by me - I don't own a macro lens so this is as good as it gets right now. Sorry about that.

29/01/2022

Currently reading:https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1929134.pdf

An article going quite in depth into the relationship between ant and fungus.

Just a heads-up - now we're gonna get speculative here again, and some of what I say might not be nailed to the ground as absolute truth. Maybe in the future it will be. Who knows? I am just trying to put together a picture here, so bear with me.

The common level of knowledge about ant-fungus mutualism, is, I think, mainly regarding the most specialised genera - the New World leafcutters in tribe Attini.

At the nuptial flight, the queen alate brings a pellet of fungus mass and spores with her, in a small cavity in her mouth that basically fills the function of the cheeks of a hamster. On ants this is called an 'infrabuccal cavity'. Ants can't eat solids, but they can store a little bit in this cavity.

When she founds her colony, she will nurture the fungus and grow it from this single pellet, and fertilise the substrate and feed the fungus with her own excrement and even some eggs.

When the first workers appear, they in turn begin feeding the fungus grass clippings - and the ants in turn eat the fungus. It's their only source of food and they are completely dependent on their relationship with this fungus. If it dies, the colony dies too. The fungus, in turn, is equally reliant on the ant.

This is what is usually featured in documentaries. These are the fungus growers we are familiar with from Planet Earth or similar shows.

However, the ant-fungus mutualism hole seems to go deeper. Less advanced Attini ants grow slightly different fungus, and they grow it slightly differently.

Once again - just like in the case of ant parasitism - ant species are so diverse and niched that for every step in the evolution toward a highly specialised niche - like that of the leaf cutters - there are little side tracks to genera that haven't travelled the entire way - at least not yet. And so we can try to put together an evolutionary history from the little pit-stops on the way.

Atta and Acromyrmex are the "highest" level of fungus-gardener. They feed their fungus fresh clippings from living plants. Living plants are protected by toxins, and both these "highest" genera - and their fungi - are adapted to handle this extra load of toxins, unlike their "lower" cousins.

Right underneath the leaf cutters, we have collectors of dead vegetation: genera like Trachymyrmex and Sericomyrmex. They don't cut live plants, but collect their plant matter from the ground. Fruit, flowers, seeds, leaves. They lack the specific mutation that lets them handle living plant matter.

Among these species, by the way, there is a very promising candidate for the ant-keeping hobby - Trachymyrmex septentrionalis. They hibernate, and the fungus does too - and they appear in locations as far north as New York.

These would probably be far easier to keep in the northern hemisphere than any of the tropical leaf cutters. And they are easier to feed too. The only drawback is that you don't get the polymorphism of higher Attini. Workers are pretty much all the same shape and size. The specialisation has not gone as far. Extreme polymorphism signifies an extremely niched lifestyle.

The types mentioned so far all count as "higher" genera.

Beneath these collectors of dead plant matter, there are many species that grow their fungus on excrement, invertebrate remains, and other detritus - exactly like the leaf cutter queen does right at the beginning of her colony's life.

An example of a genus with a way of life fitting this category is Cyphomyrmex - another genus in Attini. In their case, the substrate for the fungus is pretty much what you normally find on a typical ant thrash heap, and some of the species are yeast farmers. Simpler ants, in smaller colonies, farming simpler fungi.

Here we might be getting close to a possible origin story. At some point, many millions of years ago, some ants might have discovered that the stuff growing in their thrash was actually viable food, and started eating it. Eventually they started to maintain and grow it, leaving other food sources behind.

Fast forward to today and we have obligate symbiosis of ant and fungus.

This origin is speculative, of course. Just that disclaimer again. I think it makes very much sense though.

So far, all of these species belong to tribe Attini, and exist exclusively in the New World. And all of them are, compared to other ants, very, very specialised.

But there are other associations between ants and fungi, also in the Old World. These associations are more primitive, often speculative or hypothesised, and from what is known, there are no obligate fungus farmers in the entirety of Europe, Africa or Asia.

Some examples of primitive associations with fungi are very interesting, though, and might also shine a light on other possible origins of fungus farming - both in the present and in the future.

One such example of possible "early" ant-fungus association is Lasius fuliginosus. I have read that Lagerheim believed this species cultivated fungus in the walls of their nest, and as a food source. But I have also read elsewhere, later, that this has been somehow disproven.

But in the study I linked above, they had actually looked into the contents of post-nuptial flight queens' infrabuccal cavities, and found that the pellets they kept there largely consisted of spores and fungal hyphæ.

If this species had no symbiosis with a fungus, why would this be the case? How would the pellets consistently contain large amount of hyphae and spores if this was not available in the nest? And why would the queens bring it with them if it wasn't somehow beneficial or necessary?

Is this a possible pathway into obligate fungus farming? Will L. fuliginosus have a future as a fungus agriculturalist? Is the lack of this information what has caused me to fail in starting a colony of this species? Maybe they are easier to start in natural substrates, than they are in a test tube setup?

Another interesting observation can be made in genus Messor - specialised seed collectors. There have been studies where people tried to figure out how these species stopped mold from infecting their granaries, and it appears that they have built in, chemical means of handling this issue - Anti-bacterial, and anti-fungal substances - and also substances that stop seeds from germinating.

Leaf cutters in the New World also have such features, and use similar substances to remove contaminants, bacteria and competing fungus from their gardens.

If a seed collecting species forms an alliance with a fungus that can live on pre-chewed, disinfected seed mass, then that would also constitute a possible pathway into fungus gardening.

I can imagine at least these three paths into this kind of specialised lifestyle. I think the jury is still out on which one actually took place in the Attini ants.

The hypothesis I have heard talked about the most is the pathway through seed collection into fungus farming. But unless something very interesting has happened in myrmecology lately, that I have completely missed, this question is still unsettled.

Interesting stuff nonetheless, and this is no doubt a fun read!

Irving W. Bailey, Some Relations between Ants and Fungi, Ecology, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Jul., 1920), pp. 174-189

27/01/2022

I have seen this screenshotted tweet floating about for a while. I demystified it in a reply to one of those posts, and a lot of people appreciated the information, so I am gonna post it here as well.

Maybe it is of interest.

This is the reason why ants will pile their dead around a trix.

- Approximately 48 hours after an ant dies, the body starts releasing, and smelling of, oleic acid.

- This sends the signal to other ants, that they should remove the body and put it in their graveyard.

- An ant graveyard is the place with the most oleic acid. Because that means the largest pile of dead ants.

- Trix have canola oil in them, and canola oil contains a lot of oleic acid. More than an ant graveyard has.

Result: Ants redefine their graveyard. The trix is their new graveyard now.

Useful conclusion: If you keep ants, and want them to form their graveyard in a specific spot - put a trix there and they will take the hint.

Another interesting fact:

If you drop oleic acid on a living ant, the other ants will believe it to be dead, and carry it to the graveyard, despite the "dead" ant still moving.

The ant definition of death is somewhat lacking, and doesn't take wriggling, kicking and moving into consideration. Death, for an ant, is a smell.

The person to originally discover the chemical that carries the message of death among ants was the recently deceased Prof. E. O. Wilson, a true giant in the field.

21/01/2022

Today I want to show you my upcoming ant project. Don't worry, after this I will be back to the articles I usually write.

I just want to show something off this once, so bear with me:

This is my work-in-progress DIY formicarium, which I call the Life Log... Because it's a log, and it's gonna be full of living ants. And because I'm gonna log the life of these ants using multiple very small cameras.

My idea is to do a multi-cam 24/7 stream of what goes on in the nest. Think of it as a reality show, but instead of obnoxious young adults who should really know better, it's just ants doing wholesome ant stuff.

I want this feed to go on year after year, so it's possible to tune in and see the ant colony grow and develop in real time.

In my mind, this would constitute the best reality show possible.

The colony that will live here, is one of my Formica rufa colonies - whichever of them shows the most promise this spring. I picked up several candidate queens last year, introduced them to F. fusca hosts, and now I am waiting for them to start laying. As a rule, a F. rufa queen will not start laying before she has hibernated for one winter in her host colony. This is also when I will know for sure, if they are fertile or not.

Hopefully I will end up with at least one promising F. rufa colony, that can inhabit this nest. If not, I will have to reconsider and draw up some new plans.

The reasoning behind choosing F. rufa for this project is that basically nobody keeps them, and it would be cool to be able to break some new ground.

The relative rarity of Formica rufa in the ant-keeping hobby is well justified, though, and usually it is not a very good idea to get a colony.

First of all they have parasitic colony founding, and this makes starting a colony much more difficult and unreliable.

Secondly, in large parts of Europe, they are a threatened species - which is reason enough to leave them alone - but in Sweden, where I live, they are one of the most common ants. During nuptials you can find multiple queens per square meter. Here, they are a least concern species, and they dominate every biotope with pines or spruces in it. And that's basically the entirety of Sweden.

This means I am in a somewhat unique position to actually keep them, and show them off. If I can manage, that is. They are notoriously difficult to keep long term, due to their aggression, their tendency to shoot formic acid when they are disturbed, and due to the difficulty involved in hibernating large colonies.

I have thought up solutions for these issues, that involve miniature computer fans for air circulation, and an extra fridge that can fit a large colony during the winter.

Also, there is no way this nest will fit a full-size F. rufa colony. It is far too small. However, it will act as a prototype, and they can inhabit it for the first two years. This will let me iron out any kinks and make a better forever home for them.

I am looking forward to actually making this real this upcoming spring.

Some steps remain before this project can take off though:

1. Sculpt the chambers
2. Make moisture chamber inserts (I don't want the wood to rot)
3. Install cameras and fans into the walls
4. Compose lo-fi ant songs as an ambience for the feed
5. Set up my old mac mini to manage the cams
6. Put up a Youtube channel for streaming
6. Put up two monitors in my office with this feed on 24/7 :D

I am gonna tell you when I get this running. In the meantime, I will write more articles.

The next article will be about how seed collecting ants are just one fungus away from being leaf cutters, but we'll get there next time.

19/01/2022

What are ants and how did they happen? How does something like this evolve in the first place? What is eusociality really, and where does it come from?

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Just a disclaimer - I am not gonna hedge myself every time I make a qualified guess. I am trying to paint a narrative here, that I think carries some merit.

I am gonna root some of this post in actual science to back up my ideas, but we’re entering highly speculative territory, so bear with me.

From genetic studies, we know ants are closely related to both mud dauber wasps (Sphecidae and Crabronidae) as well as bees (Apis). I am gonna use the mud dauber as a starting point, because even though bees have elbowed antennae - a trait they share with ants - the mud daubers are more anatomically and behaviourally similar to primitive ants.

I am also going to refer to a weird behaviour of certain primitive ants - So called “queenless” or “gamergate” ants in Ponera, for example Diacamma rugosum. Such queenless species are considered very socially primitive, and they have no physical caste distinction between worker and queen. Instead, the “queenship” is a social, or even “cultural” function, enforced by the queen systematically mutilating the ge****ls of every worker as they hatch from their cocoons.

The first, most primitive stage of queen/worker caste distinction, is basically the distinction between females that have intact ge****ls, and those who had their ge****ls chewed off by their mother so they are unable to reproduce on their own. And so, with their own reproductive chances eliminated, the closest thing to evolutionary success they will ever have, is helping their mother in her breeding efforts. Welcome to the beautiful and utterly amoral world of ants.

The D. rugosum “culture” is an enforcement of a very early stage of eusociality. At that stage, there is no “anatomical” backing for the system. No distinction between queen and worker. Just a “cultural” or “behavioural” distinction - who gets their junk chewed off, and who gets to keep it intact?

Even in more complex ant societies with pronounced caste distinction, workers are always fundamentally female individuals, that have lost their ability to breed. And they come from fertilised eggs, just like queens. With Diacamma in mind, it is easy to see the pathway of this evolution.

A third piece of data that we can use to figure this out - this one is fuzzier and has less formal backing - is that there is a pull in hymenopterans in general, towards parasitism. There seems to be a connection between exploitation and reproduction that lies deep in the behavioural structure of the entirety of Hymenoptera.

I can qualify this somewhat. Solitary wasps are, as a rule, parasitoids (yeah exceptions exist). They capture prey, stun it with their stinger, and lay their egg on top of, or inside of it.

It is also a normal case that the parasitoid wasp preying on, say, caterpillars, has a parasitoid wasp of its own, which exploits it. In some cases, this ladder of exploitation has many steps, each parasitising the one right below itself.

The structure of the internal relationship between wasp species, is, basically, a system of parasitic exploitation.

My suspicion is that this happened for two reasons. The first reason is that the adult wasp lives from nectar, and only the larva needs protein. The second is that the stinger is also the ovipositor. The thing used for hurting, is the same thing used for laying eggs.

It is such a small detail, but over time, I believe these things become heavily associated with each other in a very general sense. Breeding and Exploiting becomes the same thing, and instead of eating each other, as is customary among mammals that use each other as resources, wasps evolve to exploit and use other wasps for reproduction in a parasitic manner.

So, where am I going with this?

My hypothesis is that ants, at their core, is a system that consists of a mother, socially parasitising and exploiting her own daughters, so they raise her offspring instead of their own.

This is accomplished through castration of the daughters - either actual physical castration as in primitive species, or a highly adapted type of “castration” defined by a female caste that is physically unable to breed from birth - That is, the worker ant.

Now we have arrived at last at our hypothetical proto-ant:

A wingless wasp (as we can today find in Mutillidae, Myrmocidae, Gelis) that has evolved multigenerational nests inhabited by several generations of females. There is a dominant female, and the internal hierarchy of who is allowed to breed, is determined by some sort of dominance fight (as can be seen in Diacamma when the dominant female has died, and there is nobody around to castrate hatching workers).

Since the mother and non-breeding daughters stay in the nest indefinitely, they can guard it, creating a safer environment for the offspring. And they can continuously bring the larvae additional food, instead of filling a chamber with prey, laying an egg and sealing that chamber.

There are semi-social bees with basically this social structure even today.

At some point, the castration-at-birth behaviour evolves, and the dominant female thus does not have to continually compete for her breeding rights anymore. She completely monopolises breeding.

In my opinion, that creature, that takes the step from competing with her daughters, to simply exploiting them, would create a permanent apex “parasite” caste inside the colony. This would in my eyes constitute the first proper ants, and that dominant female would constitute the first Ant Queen.

And that is my thesis - “Ants” are defined by, and evolved through, a species-internal parasitic caste hierarchy consisting of a mother exploiting her own reproductively stunted daughters to maximise her own reproduction.

This is in line with what we know about the evolutionary history of ants, and it is consistent with the very general way wasps tend to one-up each other.

Once again, this is speculative af and I would like to talk to people about it. If this sparks any ideas, or if you happen to know something relevant, please add your ponderings as a comment.

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PICTURES: Not mine. Just picked from the net. Credit where credit is due. Please contact me if you have any issues with me using these images.

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Note: Previously I have written about the type of permanent parasitism exemplified by Strongylognathus. Are there not similarities between the way a queen reduces her daughters to workers, and the way Strongylognathus reduces its closely related host to a _producer_ of workers?

Is it possible to model Strongylognathus as a "caste" of Tetramorium? I know the definition of a species and so on. I am asking at a more metaphorical level.

EDIT: Minor corrections and stylistic changes.