Footage of ant queens working together has been captured by a BBC film crew.
As the sole reproducer in a colony, ant queens are traditionally considered lone figures.
However, in certain species unrelated queens will sometimes co-operate to kick-start a new colony.
The team filming for BBC Two series Natural World believe this is the first footage to show honeypot ant queens co-operating in the wild.
Filmmakers spent 150 days in the deserts of Arizona, US to capture the behaviour of the ants Myrmecocystus mimicus.
Filming the foundation of a new colony was a considerable challenge because the insects rarely ventured above ground.
The team's chance came following a mating swarm that happens only once a year.
The honeypot ants timed their mating so that the ground was soft enough for queens to dig a nest.
After weeks of checking the weather radar through the night, cameraman John Brown finally had the perfect opportunity to film the ants but had to do so before the sun baked them to death.
An early start paid off for the team who were able to capture in detail the greeting between two queens and their subsequent co-operation.
Prof Holldobler first documented the "slave-making" behaviour of M mimicus in 1976 and, since then, he has studied the ants' complex social behaviour.
In addition to filming the foundation of the colony, the film crew was able to film inside the nest to see what happened next.
Their cameras revealed that once the queens had raised an army of workers, a subtle but lethal "revolution" took place.
Ant specialist and wrangler Ray Mendez facilitated the filming, having worked extensively with ants in the area.
Mendez pointed out that, rather than valuing a single sovereign, the worker ants were simply picking off the weakest queens to manage their resources better.
After digging the nest and raising the first brood, Mendez says, the weakest queens are abandoned by their colony.
"At that point, [the queen has] expended all of her energy stores," he explained.
But rather than select a single "monarch", honeypot ant colonies with sufficient space will occasionally support multiple queens.
"They don't necessarily sit next to each other like a bunch of chums," Mendez said.
But with underground nests extending to depths of up to 3m, Mendez has found as many as half a dozen queens in one colony.
Prof Holldobler's genetic research has also confirmed that, although it is not common, multiple queens can exist in a single colony.
Source : The Daily Star
