Ants: The strategy of population concentration

Abstract

Ants are provided with a system of balanced responses to the initial small size of societies or to their secondary depopulation, which can be described as the strategy of population concentration. The successful production of workers and fertilized queens is a necessary condition for the survival and sustained development of an ant community. This requires nests sufficiently large to provide optimal conditions for reproduction. The strategy of population concentration is aimed at rapid attainment (or restoration) of a state of sustained development by concentrating the ant population present in a number of accessible viable nests. This strategy is realized at all stages in the life of ant nests by (a) fusing family cells left by founding queens, (b) fusing small offshoots in the course of artificial relocations, (c) uniting diminished societies or merging them into other nests, and (d) reintegrating secondary nests following exogenous nest fragmentation. Merging (compensating for demographic deficiency through external sources) is the most efficient and quickest way of establishing or restoring the threshold level of abundance. Using this strategy, ants solve the paramount problems of preserving a society (settlement) at any particular time and providing for its future development. These tasks are so vital to ant societies that they take priority over other important factors such as genetic kinship or even species identity. The priority of the social principle over the genetic one is unequivocally confirmed by the widespread phenomenon of mixed ant families. A necessary condition for the realization of the strategy of population concentration is tolerance to a diversity of forms and to deviations from the norm observed in highly developed social systems. Employment of the same mechanism at all stages in the life of both individual societies and large ant settlements gives evidence of this strategy’s universality and its undeniable importance in the life of ant communities.