Type, community, family of ants

Theoretical discussions of each of these concepts are many volumes. The combination in the nature of the laws of related, social, taxonomic is an extremely difficult set of problems. All the decisions coming to the head in the first 15 minutes were expressed more than a hundred years ago and stumbled upon counterarguments. And therefore, it is worth not rushing with answers, but carefully trace how the things that we denote different concepts are really intertwined in nature.

First of all, such a common thing as an anthill. Anthill of red forest ants, a group of species Formica Rufa. Each anthill is formed by sisters (working ants are barren females); In addition, in the family of ants there are several (sometimes quite a lot) prolific females, “queens”. The family is very difficult: outwardly, a single nesting dome actually consists of several sectors - “columns”. In each column, the working ants attributed to this column, their females and cams with brood. The column usually has one road. If several ants depart from the anthill - 3, 4 or 5 - it means that it is most likely divided into 3, 4, 5 columns, relatively independent segments of an ant family. The anthill, like a submarine, is divided into compartments, if something happens to one-others will survive. Although there is a continuous exchange of individuals between the columns ... But these are already very complex things. The organization of the anthill is a special subject, it is required to describe it - not one monograph is required (A.A. Zakharov. Intraspecific relations in ants. M.: 1972).

We move on. Anthill is a family. Ideally, in the simplest case, the anthill can be founded by the only female. After a marriage flight, it digs the mink, and a new family begins. Usually everything happens more complicated, ants accept females from other nests of their appearance, if they do not have enough females in the family, so not necessarily everything in the nest - the descendants of one female ... But these are already some additions and complexity. Let's try to go up to the next level. There are many anthills, anthills of the same species stand in dozens and hundreds of meters from each other. Are they somehow connected?

Yes, they form a "federation". If you pronounce inevitably inaccurate human analogies, these are a “state”. The federation may include several dozen or even hundreds of anthills, its population is billions of ants (in one F.Pratensis nest there can be up to 500,000 individuals). Between the anthills of the same federation there is an exchange of dolls, workers transfer dolls and young workers to where they may be required. The passage is the smell: the odor passport is one for the entire federation; If an ant of the same species is approaching the post at the entrance to the anthill, but from another federation (especially - another species ...), it will be driven away or killed. And again, the details of the life of the Ant Federation are an interesting topic, only you can talk about it for a very long time. But we have a different topic that drives us away from the problems of an ant state (A.A. Zakharov. Muravia, family, colony. M.: Nauka, 1978; Zakharov A.A. Organization of communities at the ants. M.: Nauka, 1991. 278 pp.).

The federations are sometimes formed from related anthills. The anthills can multiply “vegetatively”: not just the female flies into marriage and somewhere in the distance, it bases a new nest, and a powerful detachment with a female and many workers comes out of the overgrown colony, leaves and makes in an intended place, near the parent anthill, a new, subsidiary of a nest. But besides such related families, streams of one surpassed family, the federation may include anthills of the same species, but not related to each other. How this happens, how they reach a “common passport”, how they agree - a separate topic with a mass of wonderful and in many ways not yet clarified details.

We move on. And can ants of different species somehow unite? Yes, sure. Two familiar and well -studied methods: slavery and social parasitism. Ant slavery is an extremely interesting form of social behavior. There are types of aggressive, while others are more flexible. Aggressive species are scouting, where there are “flexible” nests: soldiers arrange a raid, kill the whole guard, take with them dolls of a “submissive” species. Then, in the nest of slaveholders, young ants of a different type leave the dolls and begin to work. Sometimes, at the same time, a viewer, a form of a worker generally loses the ability to eat on his own-he is fed by workers-slaves. Sometimes it does not reach such extremes. Among the F.rufa group there is such an anti-worker ant-F.Sanguinea.

Social parasitism is when a female of a certain species, instead of in order to base a nest in labor and dangers, is instilled into an anthill of a different kind. Well, how she bypasses “customs barriers” and deceives the working ants - this is another story. There are many dozens of such types - ants living with social parasitism. There are all options; Sometimes the female-caper kills a local female in a fight, lays eggs, behind which ants of the captured nest are caring, then the Muravy-ghizhmes are dying out of old age, and the nest is already fully belonging to the invaders. And in other cases, ants engaged in social parasitism generally lost caste of workers and soldiers. They have only females and males: males die, fertilizing females, and they are introduced into other people's anthills and lay eggs, from which only females, “queens” come out. There are no workers at all: when the workers of the host anthill will feed young females of a different species, female dicks, they fly away-infect the following anthills.

And how? Can they live together without wars and parasitism? Can normal social associations of ants of different species exist-not on the basis of violence or deceit and crowding out, but in a common social way? So that there are several females of different types in the anthill? Both slave owners and social parasites kill female hosts, the nest is a “house without a king”, working ants-in some way the “living shell” of the nest (not everything is so simple: in some conditions, workers begin to lay eggs, but we will lower these details). And in cases of slavery and parasiticism, the female-proviser is introduced into someone else's nest and lives there alone or surrounded by its type-the working species-host here is only the “walls” of the old house. And what would live several different females of different species, each with their own workers, peacefully in one nest, making one family?

Yes, and this also exists, the facts have been known for a long time, but there were no detailed observations and explanations. And now there is: A.A. Zakharov with co -authors conducted many years of observation (since 1966) in the Mirmecological Reserve “Verkhnyaya Klyazma”. We watched a complex of species "F.rufa". It includes quite a few close species. If you try - with inevitable distortions - to translate into a “human” language, it is as close as our appearance, Cro -Magnons, and Neanderthals. Our close appearance was apparently eaten by us, and the ants have a large number of very close species, such ant “Neanderthals”, live next to each other.

Mixed families of these species are obtained, as it turned out, for four reasons. 1) hybridization (close species of many living creatures can be crossed and offered offspring, more or less prolific); 2) taking females of close species (usually, with a lack of females in the anthill, they take females of their appearance after a marriage flight, but if not enough, they can also accept a female of someone else's appearance); 3) the capture of other people's dolls during the campaign (slavery); 4) the unification in one nest of organized structures of various types (Zakharov A.A., Zakharov R.A. 2009. The phenomenon of mixed families in red forest ants // Ants and forest protection. Nizhny Novgorod. P. 160-165).

The last option is now most interesting to us. How does this happen? It turns out that in the forest anthills are often destroyed. Either the wild boars will scattered, then bears, then woodpeckers or black grouse will destroy. And there was an anthill F.Sanguinea (View-Worker) with F.Fusca's "slaves". In addition to ordinary “slaves” in this anthill, “slaves” were F.Aquilonia. Then, 18 m from the nest appeared a strong anthill F.Truncorum - and this new species captured the old anthill, exterminating F.Sanguinea. The result was F.Truncorum+F.Aquilonia family; These two species lived together for 3 years, and then F. Aquilonia left the general nest, built their own nearby, two anthills were first connected with the common road, then the exchanges of individuals ceased, and the anthills became completely independent.

So, at least sometimes, if there is a mixed anthill, the ants will gradually disperse, creating a “clean” family of one species. This is if no one bothers. However, it turned out that ant enemies - the same wild boars and woodpeckers - destroy 90% of anthills per year. That is, in some places, anthills are constantly destroyed, and the surviving parts of the families are trying to organize new anthills. Often - with a different look.

And therefore, other plots are very frequent. After F.Polyctena and F.Aquilonia’s nests destroyed the wild boars, they migrated and united in 4 nests, each of which had both types. Soon, these colonies, having settled down, formed a complex of 21 anthills of a mixed two-vynaya composition. By type, the anthill was built characteristic of F.Polyctena, which were numerically larger in families. In another case, the F.Polyctena socket complex was not damaged, but nearby the wild boars ruined the F.Aquilonia and F.Lugubris nests. And the ants of these species were hooked into the anthill of F.Polyctena, and they accepted them. Now there are three-vision anthills.

In conditions of constant violations, ants do not have time to divide by type - apparently, this process is not very fast and (maybe?) Not very important for them. So in the zones of constant violations for a long time there are anthills, in appearance completely ordinary. And 2-3 different types live in them, each has their own breaking females, their own manners of hunting.

How are these families organized? How to understand the "type", which in this case is an intra -family grouping of unclear status? How in such conditions these species are still preserved-after all, the differences between them are quite stable, and world-systems confidently define them as different species, and environmentalists also confidently build different ecological ranks between these types-dominance of views of each other in case of competition for the common source of food, preferred hunting places and prey types. Unfortunately, what kind of families these are, how all this is combined with ant federations, whether there is any special status of these species that can peacefully live together in the same family, with a common dome-all this has not yet been studied. But studied. Right now.