Overtaking a throne sometimes takes a touch of matricide.
Some newly mated ant queens sneak into other ant colonies and spray their queens with a liquid that sends workers into a murderous frenzy, researchers report November 17 in Current Biology. After the workers do the parasitic queen’s dirty work, she can ascend the throne and begin laying her own eggs.
“This is, to our knowledge, the first case where a third party benefits from matricide,” says Keizo Takasuka, a behavioral ecologist and entomologist at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan.
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