THIS is the remarkable moment a cunning ant manages to invade a nest and trick workers into killing the queen – only to take the crown for herself.
The parasitic ant imposter watches on as a swarm of ants unwittingly pull their own mother apart for four painfully slow days.
How did she pull it off this brutal game of thrones? It all comes down to odours.
Shocked scientists observed as an secret raider integrated herself into the nest pretending to be one of the colony.
“Ants live in the world of odours,” explained Keizo Takasuka of Kyushu University, who led the research.
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“Before infiltrating the nest, the parasitic queen stealthily acquires the colony’s odour on her body from workers walking outside so that she is not recognised as the enemy.”
The lasius orientalis ants – as seen in the video – are particularly reliant on scent to identify both friends and foes, which the invader takes full advantage of.
After several hours, she makes it to the queen and squirts her with an abdominal fluid, causing her daughters to turn against her.
Hoards slowly attack, with numbers increasing after a second squirt.
The parasitic ant routinely goes in and squirts her some more before quickly running away, so the crowd keeps going for the real queen.
“She knows the odour of formic acid is very dangerous, because if host workers perceive the odour they would immediately attack her as well,” Takasuka goes on.
Overall the queen – which is a lasius orientalis ant – is squirted 15 times in the first 20 hours following the initial spray.
After four days of relentless assaults, the worker ants mutilate the queen, pulling her apart into two pieces, completely unaware they’ve actually killed the real queen and their mother.
Now the stealthy murder plan is complete, the ant can return to the scene to lay her own eggs and let the workers take care of her and her offspring.
Ant species exploiting scent as a cover is nothing new to scientists but only now have the actions that cause this matricidal behaviour been observed, a study published in Current Biology says.
Researchers now want to find out if other insects outside of ants use “bad smell” to infiltrate.
“Only ants in the subfamily Formicinae use formic acid to elicit violent responses, but I don’t rule out the possibility that non-formic-acidic ants and social wasps commit matricide in similar ways,” Takasuka added.
