I am not knowledgeable about anything insect-related at all, and the majority of my knowledge about ant colonies comes from Gödel, Escher, Bach, so what I'm about to ask will probably be pretty weird and stupid.
As I'm looking at an anthill, I can see the ants come and go, and if I were to tag and follow each individual, I imagine I could define a single colony based on the individual ants that always return to that one colony. And the young ants that replace the older ants as they die. Like I can identify the cells that compose one human as all part of the same human, even as they die and grow.
So, first question: Does an individual ant serve only one colony throughout its life, or do they actually mix it up between different colonies?
So, continuing with this possibly totally flawed concept of an ant colony as a superorganism, I realize that the colony must be able to propagate in some way. I mean, of course there are more and more colonies as time goes by. It's not just one colony that's been keeping to itself for millions of years.
So, second question: How do ant colonies reproduce themselves? I imagine it's something along the lines of, a new queen is born and instead of being eaten or something, she goes off with some of the ants from the original colony and starts her own, kind of like my tenuous grasp on how bee colonies propagate.
It's probably different for different species or something.
[link] [comments]
source https://www.reddit.com/r/Entomology/comments/grhw94/how_do_anthills_propagate/
No comments:
Post a Comment