By Susan Milius
A test of what once seemed too obvious to test—whether ant colonies suffer after being raided by slavemaker ants—suggests that some of the raiding insects have been getting unfair press.
One of more than 20 species called slavemakers, Protomognathus americanus ants are so tiny that a colony lives in an acorn. They plunder larvae and pupae from even smaller species’ colonies and then raise the young captives to work in their own acorns.
That sounds bad for the slaves, but their losses don’t seem to cause long-term harm, according to James F. Hare of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg and Thomas M. Alloway of the University Toronto-Erindale. Hare described their studies last week in Atlanta at the annual Animal Behavior Society meeting.