Happy 3rd Birthday to my Camponotus nicoborensis queen and her lovely daughters!
This photos shows beginnings of a colony now in the thousands. It starts with one ant, the queen, this is my Camponotus nicoborensis queen 2 years ago with her first workers. The first workers are called nanitics and smaller than all the workers that follow. They are the product of the fat & food in the queen’s body when she flies. (hence small size)
Imagine running a marathon, getting uh ‘married,’ building a house & giving birth to 3 kids all without eating anything! This queen will soon be 3 years old! This photo is the colony at its most fragile moment. The queen is nearly starving and her little workers must find food for her or it will fail. Happily these ants live in a plush ant resort with frozen fruit flies and sugar water right by their nest for the easy taking. They won’t need to fight rivals to get this food or worry about being eaten by a spider on the way there. In nature it’s not so easy. Most new colonies never make it.
I sometimes compare queen ants to self-replicating probes containing everything needed, including the wits, to set up a city from next to nothing. Some queens fly with a bit of the fungus their species has domesticated for agriculture, others fly holding a pregnant scale insect in their mandibles— aphid like creatures domesticated by ants to produce honeydew for their meals.
The queen and her supplies are together an information-dense self-organizing package— bigger than a single species.
