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 ...

For young ants at the pupal stage of life ... Ant Pupae Employ Acoustics to Communicate Social Status in Their Colony’s Hierarchy. Current Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.01.010; Cite ...

A social hierarchy like this is called a “shared-dominance hierarchy.” Other ant societies establish pecking orders in which one individual is dominant and all others share a subordinate status.

Because ants have evolved so many unique adaptations, their genome is constantly changing. But the evolution of hierarchy has been constant. For that reason, researchers believe common sets of ...

A new hierarchy has been discovered among colonies of ants. It was previously assumed that all ants in a colony were of equivalent… Not all ants are created equal, some are born to lead ...

[Luca P. Casacci et al., Ant pupae employ acoustics to communicate social status in their colony's hierarchy] Ants rasp and chirp by scraping a spike on their waist against a ridged section of ...

Because all the workers in an ant colony look the same, tracking their movements and interactions by eye is fiendishly difficult. Instead, Danielle Mersch and her colleagues tagged every single ...