Ants Smell Cheaters
I found this story on Digg, but researchers have found a way that ants keep their society in check. From the article, it says that workers ants which are essentially daughters of the queen have the ability to reproduce if necessary without a male. This happens when a colony loses a queen. During this process, the ants give off a specific pheremone. However, when researchers put the pheremone on a ant within a colony with a queen, the other worker ants promptly attacked it. This reaction was not observed with any other pheremone that they tried. I guess it’s a form of preventing the worker ants to reproduce and to keep the colony population in check.
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