Name: Mating frenzies, sperm hoards, and brood raids: the life of a fire ant queen - Walter R. Tschinkel
Uploaded: 2020-01-17T04:44:32.000Z
Duration: 5 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

and the sky is filling with creatures  we wouldn't normally expect to find there.

At first glance, this might be a disturbing sight.

But for the lucky males and females  of Solenopsis invicta,

otherwise known as fire ants,  it's a day of romance.

when thousands of reproduction-capable  male and female ants,

called alates,  take wing for the first and last time.

But even for successful males  who manage to avoid winged predators,

And for a successfully mated female,  her work is only beginning.

Having secured a lifetime supply of sperm  from her departed mate,

our new queen must now single-handedly  start an entire colony.

she searches for a suitable spot  to build her nest.

Ideally, she can find somewhere  with loose, easy-to-dig soil—

like farmland  already disturbed by human activity.

Once she finds the perfect spot,  she breaks off her wings—

creating the stubs  that establish her royal status.

Then, she starts digging  a descending tunnel ending in a chamber.

Here the queen begins laying her eggs,  about ten per day,

and the first larvae hatch within a week.

the new queen relies on a separate batch  of unfertilized eggs

losing half her body weight  in the process.

these larvae grow  into the first generation of workers,

ready to forage for food  and sustain their shrunken queen.

Her daughters  will have to work quickly though—

returning their mother  to good health is urgent.

dozens of neighboring queens  are building their own ant armies.

These colonies  have peacefully coexisted so far,

a phenomenon known as brood-raiding  begins.

Workers from nests  up to several meters away

begin to steal offspring  from our queen.

but new waves of raiders  from even further away

Within hours, the raiders have taken  our queen's entire brood supply

and the queen's surviving daughters  abandon her.

the queen follows the raiding trail  to the winning nest.

She fends off other losing queens  and the defending nest's workers,

fighting her way  to the top of the brood pile.

Her daughters help their mother succeed  where other queens fail—

defeating the reigning monarch,  and usurping the brood pile.

Eventually,  all the remaining challengers fail,

until only one queen—  and one brood pile— remains.

Now presiding over several hundred workers in the neighborhood's largest nest,

our victorious queen begins  aiding her colony in its primary goal:

For the next several years,  the colony only produces sterile workers.

But once their population  exceeds about 23,000,

the colony will produce  fertile alate males and females.

The colony spawns these larger ants  throughout the early summer,

and returns to worker production  in the fall.

After heavy rainfalls,  these alates take to the skies,

and spread their queen's genes  up to a couple hundred meters downwind.

But to contribute  to this annual mating frenzy,

the colony must continue to thrive  as one massive super-organism.

Every day, younger ants feed the queen  and tend to the brood,

while older workers  forage for food and defend the nest.

these older warriors fend them off  using poisonous venom.

After rainfalls,  the colony comes together,

And when a disastrous flood  drowns their home,

the sisters band together  into a massive living raft—

the life of a colony must come to an end.

After about 8 years,  our queen runs out of sperm

The nest's population dwindles,  and eventually,

they're taken over  by a neighboring colony.

Our queen's reign is over,  but her genetic legacy lives on.