Army Ants by Daniel J. C. Kronauer

Army Ants by Daniel J. C. Kronauer

Author:Daniel J. C. Kronauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press


FIGURE 5.6  An Eciton burchellii submajor in an experimental laboratory setup is guarding a male cocoon that has been removed from a statary bivouac. The meconium, which the larva excretes as it enters pupation, is visible through the bottom of the cocoon as a black dot.

This brings us to the important topic of caste development. How is it possible to raise different female larvae that do not systematically differ in their DNA sequence into vastly different types of adults? In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin actually used African Dorylus driver ants (Figure 5.7) to illustrate this extreme case of phenotypic plasticity:

The reader will perhaps best appreciate the amount of difference in these workers, by my giving not the actual measurements, but a strictly accurate illustration: the difference was the same as if we were to see a set of workmen building a house, of whom many were five feet four inches high, and many sixteen feet high; but we must in addition suppose that the larger workmen had heads four instead of three times as big as those of the smaller men, and jaws nearly five times as big. The jaws, moreover, of the working ants of the several sizes differed wonderfully in shape, and in the form and number of the teeth. (240–241)



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