Surprisingly, some ant species (for example, Protomognathus americanus) have a habit of having slaves. Ants Protomognathus are very tiny in size, the average weight of one insect is no more than five milligrams. However, despite their small size, these ants often raid other people's anthills, kill all adult insects, and take the young into slavery. The slaves do all the work - looking after the larvae, taking care of the ant queen, etc.
But, as with the bipedal slave owners, Protomognathus is often faced with riots.
And then …
Some slaves (for example, ants from the species Temnothorax), having matured, begin to kill all enemy chrysalises that can only be found in the anthill. So they can destroy up to 60-70% of the young generation of slave ants.
Researchers from the University of Munich, Alexandra Achenbach and Susanne Fouzik, studied 88 colonies of Protomognathus ants - in all they found slave ants from the species Temnothorax. All slaves who reached adulthood began to kill the larvae of their masters. In some cases, the slaves even joined up in small squads to destroy enemy dolls, literally tearing them apart.
Interestingly, such a "riot", in fact, does not bring any benefit to the enslaved ants, but it reduces the number of the colony of slave-owning ants. This means that there will be fewer raids on other Temnothorax longispinosus colonies.
This partly explains why colonies of the Protomognathus species never grow to large sizes. Although the captured ants remain in slavery forever - they help their relatives, conducting brutal sabotage in the camp of the enemy.
Moreover, the observations of the researchers showed that the effectiveness of the struggle of the slave ants with the offspring of the owners depends on the degree of kinship of the individuals taken prisoner with those colonies on which there were no raids. That is, if there is a free colony of T. longispinosus in the area where the nest of slave ants is located, with which the slave ants are closely related, then most likely the captives of T. longispinosus will try to inflict as much harm on their slave owners as possible. And vice versa: if there are no relatives of the enslaved T. longispinosus near the anthill of the slave owners, then the slave ants will probably reluctance to rebel.
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