Home Ant's Uterus

The whole life of the colony domestic ants spinning around the uterus. It does not produce food, does not protect the anthill, does not remove garbage. But it is the ant queen of domestic ants that lays eggs and ensures the constant replenishment of the family with new members.

From its well-being depends on the ability of the colony to survive and the spread of the entire species. Therefore, the home ant's womb is the main unit of this species.

On a note

The scientific name of the domestic ant is the pharaohs ant. In the future, it is this term that we will sometimes use.

Interestingly, the relationship of the uterus with other members of the colony pharaoh ants somewhat different from those of other species. Perhaps that is why domestic ants have managed to spread around the world faster and more completely than their other relatives.

 

Uterus of a domestic ant: photos, description, body structure

The uterus of domestic ants is approximately twice as large as the working individuals and reaches a length of 4–4.5 mm. The color of her body is dark brown with clearly visible red thin dressings on the back of the abdomen. These insect coloring elements are clearly visible in the photo below:

In general, the uterus of a domestic ant does not look just like a copy of a working individual. Its abdomen is much larger in relation to the main body, and in general it is more massive and less mobile.

The most characteristic difference between the uterus and the working ant is the enlarged chest (the second segment of the body behind the head). In workers, the chest is very small and does not exceed the size of the head itself.

The uterus, already founded a colony, has no wings. In the anthill itself, young females ready for fertilization are winged and hardly distinguishable from males. At the same time, their light long wings are not particularly needed for them: pharaoh ants do not have flying.

The photo below shows several winged females:

On a note

All working individuals in the nest of domestic ants are females incapable of breeding. Therefore, the question “what the female ant looks like” hardly makes sense.

In other species of ants, the female is called the womb from the moment when she leaves the colony and establishes her own. In domestic ants, the uterus does not create a separate colony, and this is the whole difficulty of dealing with these pests.

In the photo below - the uterus of a domestic ant surrounded by workers:

 

A little biology: how the uterus lives and how it feeds

Most ants in an anthill once a year a large number of females and males capable of breeding appear from the pupae, which mate during the so-called summer flight. After that, the fertilized females no longer return to their native colony, but crawl around in the vicinity and try to find places where they can lay their first eggs and raise working individuals.

Immediately after the summer, the female bites off her wings, receiving additional nutrients to organize the new settlement.

In house ants, this process looks different. They have males in the colony in small quantities constantly. Working ants feed them, but in general they are treated “not very respectfully,” almost like simple seed banks.

It is interesting

In the colony of domestic ants, only 10-15% of individuals search for food and leave the anthill. The rest of the workers are engaged in servicing the female and caring for offspring.So those insects that you sometimes see, for example, in the kitchen - this is only a small part of that huge number that develops somewhere near the house ...

Breeding females appear in the colony when it reaches a certain size. They are fertilized by males and remain to live and breed here. So in the colony of domestic ants can live a few hundred queens. They show no hostility towards each other.

It is interesting

Experts believe that with a small number of ants in the colony, the uterus sprinkles eggs with special pheromones that block the sexual development of ants. Working ants are derived from such treated eggs. When the colony becomes too large, the uterus simply lacks pheromones, and the raw eggs develop normally. So nature has provided for the development of labor at the very start of the development of the anthill and the possibility of its growth - when it reaches a certain size.

When the ants become crowded in one anthill, some of them move to neighboring convenient places. At the same time, a new anthill is not formed: there is a strong connection between the “metropolis” and “colonies”, the uterus can move from one nest to another, the ants exchange food.

Thus, a super mound of grass is formed in a large number of autonomous formations. To destroy it is extremely difficult: for this you need to find all the nests and kill all the queens in them.

The photo below shows the ant queen of domestic ants near the eggs:

The ant queen lives up to 12-15 years, laying over 500,000 eggs in its lifetime. The working ants feed it with food or belch.

Due to the large number of breeding queens in the colony, working ants are not particularly respectful of each of them, even the one that founds the colony: they move the queen from the nest to the nest, and can even kill the one that lays too few eggs. This explains the high breeding efficiency of domestic ants.

 

Reproduction and resettlement of domestic ants: the role of the uterus in the performance of life

By and large, in a very pragmatic colony of domestic ants, the uterus plays the role of a kind of conveyor of eggs. The attitude of the working ants to it can be compared to the attitude of the farmer to his cow: they love her, take care of her, but in the case of death, there are always a few young people in reserve, and disaster will not happen.

Colonies of pharaoh ants can be divided with the formation of a new settlement. In this case, several queens and several hundred working ants are moved to a separate, as a rule, already prepared place for a new colony.

Representatives of one colony to their neighbors do not show hostility. However, such a set of colonies should be distinguished from a diffuse anthill, distributed over large areas of ant's size.

It is interesting

The largest colony of pharaoh ants studied to date has 340,000 working individuals. The usual population of an anthill is 10-15 thousand individuals. The minimum sufficient for the colony to restore the number after the disaster is a few dozen ants.

Today, the phenomenon of the existence of the uterus in ants and their division into castes attracts the attention of a huge number of scientists, from ethologists studying behavior to evolutionists. It is believed that just such a hierarchy in the ant colony allowed them to become the most advanced group of insects on the planet, numerous and resistant to natural disasters.

In the activity of an anthill, there is a lot of similarity to the activity of a rational being, but at the same time it is impossible to draw an analogy of the uterus with some organ in the human body.An anthill is an organism of a special kind, and the uterus in it is the root cause and the main reproductive component. And the specifics of the position of the uterus in domestic ants allowed them to become the most common type of ants on the planet.

 

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