Anybody Remember “Honey i Shrunk The Kids”?

How do some ants end up atop the colony’s social hierarchy? An ant’s parents appear to play a key role in determining whether the insect will develop into a queen or a common worker, according to a new paper in the journal Science. (pics)

Some male/queen combinations appear to have a royal touch, yielding reproductive queens at much higher levels than other pairings.

The new finding could overturn the long-held belief that there is little genetic influence in ant caste systems.

“It’s a genetic compatability effect,” Tanja Schwander, biological researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and lead author of the paper. “The work shows that queens have to be compatible with a specific male to produce either workers or queens.

How social insect colonies function can give scientists insight into how social behavior evolved. Ant colony members generally have well-defined roles. Sterile workers take care of day-to-day tasks like finding food and rearing young while a queen mates and produces offspring. In the end, though, the workers’ hard work is rewarded when the queen passes their very similar genes on to the next generation. E.O. Wilson coined the term superorganism for exactly this type of cooperative group.

more via How Ant Queens Are Made