Reddit reviews Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Primers in Complex Systems (1))
We found 5 Reddit comments about Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Primers in Complex Systems (1)). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
When workers accept or reject a queen is fairly complex, and depends on a lot of circumstances, including presence of existing queen(s), pheremonal similarity, possibly environmental or species differences, etc. There's been some study of it lately because of scientific curiosity over how large ant colonies interact and sometimes merge into "supercolonies" that act in a functionally unified way. There seem to be some interspecific (containing multiple ant species) colonies as well, though when that happens isn't fully understood.
One citation to a small piece of the puzzle, summarizing studies on interacting networks of fire-ant colonies:
> [Ken] Ross and others showed that if enough of the ants in a colony, about 15%, have a certain allele, the colony will accept extra queens into the nest. This could be a response to interaction rate. Perhaps the ants respond to the rate at which they meet other ants that have the polygyne allele, b, which seems to affect the odor of the ant that carries it. Perhaps if the rate of interaction with b reaches a certain threshold, possibly leading workers to broaden the range of odors they include in their experience of nestmates, then the workers are more likely to accept a foreign queen.
(That quote from pp. 73-74 of this book).
This one?
This is a good book on the subject
No asking questions! You need to read this and this.