Monogynous

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As monogyn is called ants whose colonies only one fertilized queen ( Gyne have). If there are several queens living peacefully together in a colony , it is called polygynous . Oligogynous peoples have several queens, but they live separately, otherwise they would fight against each other.

Monogyny

Monogynie (Einweibigkeit) denotes the presence of a single mated and egg-laying female in a race. Mostly the people were founded by this female. It is irrelevant whether the female is an individual that was winged before mating and has thrown off its wings after mating, or whether it is an originally wingless intermediate form to the worker (intermorph; sometimes also called intercaste).

In about half of the ant species investigated, each colony has only one queen and is therefore monogynous. In the other half of the species, the colonies occasionally, mostly, or always contain several to many queens, so they are polygynous ("many-female"). These queens, too, may be winged or, as intermorphs, they may never have had wings. In the extreme case (some Ponerinae) workers and (functional) queens look exactly the same and therefore only differ in function.

The monogyny is safeguarded against the admission of young, own or foreign mated females to varying degrees. In the case of strictly monogynous, obligatorily monogynous , species, even newly mated females are no longer tolerated in the mother colony under any circumstances, and even sisters fight each other violently as soon as they are mated ( e.g. Harpagoxenus sublaevis ). Also z. B. Temnothorax unifasciatus never tolerates more than one fertile queen in the nest. And when a pleometrotic colony is founded by several young queens of Lasius niger , violent fights break out among the queens soon after the appearance of the first pupae, but at the latest after the hatching of the first workers. Ultimately, only one queen stays alive unless the last one is also injured or exhausted.

Functional monogyny

Functional monogyny is a rarer special form of monogyny. Here some of the young queens mated near the nest are taken into the mother's nest. They are tolerated there until their ovaries develop, i.e. that is, that the animals "want" to start laying eggs. This can take more than a year. Then, however, there is a hierarchy in which the strongest animal remains as queen, while the inferior migrate. Presumably this takes place with some workers.

Oligogyny

Oligogyne (Greek oligo = little) colonies have several queens, but they live spatially separated (in different, distant chambers in the nest). Since the queens do not tolerate each other, a fight would ensue if they met. In comparison with polygynous colonies, the number of queens is usually very small. A well-known example of an oligogyne species is Lasius fuliginosus , several (2) queens have also been observed in a colony of Camponotus ligniperda .

literature

  • Bernhard Seifert: Ants: observe, determine. Naturbuch Verlag, Augsburg 1996. ISBN 3-89440-170-2