Slave Making Ants

A Polyergus breviceps colony starts out as all ant colonies do, with a single queen mating and making her nuptial flight (4. Social Parasitism in Ants). The P. breviceps queen will enter the host colony, kill and replace the old queen. Once she has assumed the position of power, the ants of this colony will accept her as the new queen. She will start laying her own eggs, which the workers will tend to and by the time the old workers start dying off, multiple broods of her own P. breviceps will be fully grown. At this point, they start raiding nearby colonies of their preferred host, Formica argentea (19. Wild, A. 2010). The larvae they bring back will by raised by any remaining slaves in their hive to be the next generation of workers. This process continues for the lifetime of the colony as it makes more virgin queens that proceed to establish colonies of their own in the same manner.

Let's follow an individual Polyergus breviceps as she goes throughout the day. After she activates in the morning, she will interact with other passing ants on her way through the nest. Through tallying and comparing rates of encounters with other ants, she decides that today, she'll be a scout. She leaves the nest in search of a neighboring colony. Sometime during the day she encounters exactly what she's looking for; a Formica argentea hive. Immediately, she makes a beeline back to her colony, trailing a pheromone behind her. Other scouts will walk the trail to confirm the existence of the F. argentea colony, trailing their own pheromones, and after the pungency of the path grows strong enough, the rest of the P. argentea group at the nest and follow the trail to the host nest to capture larvae to be reared as slaves.