Constructing hatcheries to prevent ant worker access from the soil beneath may discourage army ant predation, as long as abiotic conditions appropriate for turtle development can be maintained. Amazon ...

New research suggests the turtle ants' strategic shift from offense to defense was made possible by their partnership with 46-million-year-old gut bacteria.

Laborer, doorkeeper, future queen: Neurobiology in turtle ants reflects division of labor. PLOS. Journal PLOS One DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0213618 ...

Turtle ant (Cephalotes varians) colonies are socially organized into multiple castes which are behaviorally and phenotypically different.These include sterile minor workers (who perform the ...

The study was inspired by work Russell did with Carrie Moreau, PhD, and Naomi Pierce, PhD, in Pierce's lab more than a decade ago when they discovered that many ants with low-quality diets harbored ...

You've probably heard about poop pills, the latest way for humans to get benevolent bacteria into their guts. But it seems that a group of ants may have been the original poop pill pioneers -- 46 ...

Turtle ants also have a caste system. The number of different female castes within that system can sometimes vary between species, but in all colonies, there is only one queen.

No other ants, that is, except the turtle ant Ce. specularis . While most other turtle ants adopt squat, defensive stances, Ce. specularis protects itself through mimicry.

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.

Without 46 million year-old bacteria, turtle ants would need more bite and less armor Date: March 6, 2018 Source: Drexel University Summary: Socially transmitted, nitrogen-providing microbes have ...