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On a recent outing when discussing the unique aspects of Human beans, Spolans was quick to say we’re different than all other animals because we affect nature in such a great scale, I said “According to their scale, ants do it as well.” There was then something about personalities or some such and I said “Say Ol’ Chaps, do you suppose there are lazy ants?”

Lazy ants “social cancer” of colony

It’s brief and I can’t find their link to the more in depth article, but this is the gist:

Lazy “cheater ants” have been observed to take advantage of the hard working members of their colony for their own evolutionary advantage, according to research published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Scientists at the University of Tokyo found that larger ants in the colony laid more eggs, but hardly took part in any of the co-operative activities, thus resulting in a lower fitness of the colony as a whole. These larger ants have been identified as a distinct genotype that seems to represent a lineage that has specialized in cheating described as a “social cancer” of the colony.

An important first step in the field study was to find a system containing both co-operators and cheaters living together under natural conditions. In colonies of this particular ant, females reproduce asexually and there are very few males in the population as a result. The usual queen caste is absent and the females share reproductive and work duties over the course of their life.

There is another google hit about worker ants that never work.  This is primarily about a type of ant that exploits the weakness of others to do work for them, that article is right here if you’re interested.

But if you really want to get the best answers on the internet, you go to the most knowledgeable place on Earth… no, not wikipedia.. yahoo answers: