Feb. 12, 2013 — Ants are just about
everywhere you look, and yet it's largely unknown how they manage to be so
ubiquitous. Scientists have understood the carnal mechanism of ant
reproduction, but until now have known little of how successful the daughters
of a colony are when they attempt to found new colonies.
For the first time, Stanford biologists have
been able to identify specific parent ants and their own children in wild ant
colonies, making it possible to study reproduction trends.
And in a remarkable display of longevity, an
original queen ant was found to be producing new ants several decades after
mating, sending out daughter queens throughout her 20- to 30-year lifespan.
"Most animals produce offspring for a
while, and then they enter a life stage where they don't," Gordon said.
"These queen ants are mating once, storing that sperm in a special sac,
keeping it alive and using it to fertilize eggs for another 25 years."
From an ecological viewpoint, an ant colony
is much like a tree putting out seeds, with the potential to create new trees.
An ant queen produces genetically identical worker ants that live in the same
colony, and also produces sons, and daughter queens. The daughter queens, after
mating, establish new colonies of their own.
Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at
Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the
Environment, has been studying a particular population of harvester ant
colonies in southeastern Arizona for 28 years, meticulously recording when a
new colony rises or an older one falls.
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