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Ants use house guests as 'mercenaries'

Mail Online
Unwelcome lodgers can prove a social burden in many situations that make use of resources before moving on.
But fungus-farming ants use their house
guests as a useful standing army to protect their colony against dangerous threats, scientists claim.
Danish researchers studied ant warfare between three parties to discover FROM PAGE 16
that cohabiting guest colonies of ants can serve as an effective front line defense for a colony.
While ants are unusually free of infectious diseases, their societies are often invaded by social parasites; insects that exploit the resources of ant colonies for their own benefit and force the hosts to work harder.
Such lodgers escape detection by the social immune system of their hosts by producing bar-code like chemical recognition labels similar to the host's own, while others use brute force or obnoxious chemicals to infiltrate or usurp host colonies.
However, these unwelcome guests can come in useful for the host colony -despite the risk of being attacked from within - during times of great threats from the outside.
Researchers from the Centre for Social Evolution at the Department of Biology at the University of Copenhagen studied a colony of peaceful fungusfarming ants facing two natural enemies and reported the scenes were 'reminiscent of dramas in human history and literature'.
Raider ants, the genus Gnamptogenys hartmani, seeking to enter the host's home, favour a swift style of
attack to kill defenders, plunder a nest and steal food to usurp the original colony in a style of warfare not similar to Genghis Khan in the Middle Ages.
But the attackers did not reckon on the fungus-farming ants having powerful protec-tors - the fierce Megalomyrmex symmetochus guest ant parasite.
The researchers said the Megalomyrmex ants are the second natural enemy of the farmers and use alkaloid poison to permanently move in with a farming host colony to exploit its fungus farm at relative leisure.
While these invader ants are a lifelong burden for the farmers, they can turn out to be a life-saving asset when mobile raiders threaten them, as the guest ants rise to the defense of their hosts.
The scientists found that the guest ant defenses are so effective that they not only kill raiders, but their mere presence greatly decreases the probability of a raid.
The study illustrates how sophisticated and subtle co-evolutionary processes driven by natural selection can be.
The results not only show that the idea that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' can work in the world of ants, but also that natural selection can maintain lesser evils when that helps prevent greater harm.