NARRATOR:'There are lots of different shapes and sizes of ant in the colony. And that means that all the different jobs can be done, from the big to the small. They all work together as a group ...

to do lots of different jobs. GEORGE:Now the first thing that's really obvious when you look at an ant colony the adult ants seem to be of different sizes. GEORGE:Now, it's not because they're not ...

Narrator: At first glance, a fire ant hill — or mound, as it's properly called — looks impossibly small. And yet, a colony of up to 250,000 ants call it home. But here's the secret ...

Each Argentine ant colony has multiple queens, allowing the colony to expand rapidly both in population and territorial control. Today, native Californian ant species like harvester ants and ...

More information: Louis Bell-Roberts et al, Larger colony sizes favoured the evolution of more worker castes in ants, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-024-02512-7 Provided by ...

However, in some ants colony germlines are also determined earlier, in the embryonic (egg) stage, begging the question whether that makes somatization of workers as irreversible as somatization of ...

These nests typically have two or more species of ants in the colony, and can often be identified easily. For instance, many of the formicine slave-makers like P. breviceps are red ants that ...