As a result, 95 percent of the brood survives the larval stage. "Probably at first the slaves cannot tell that the larvae belong to another species," explains Foitzik. As Susanne Foitzik and her work group have shown, the enslaved worker ants feed and clean the larvae, thereby raising the offspring of their social parasite - but only up to a certain point. Back in the masters' nest, which can be located in hollow acorns, nutshells, or twigs, the brood care behavior of the emerging slave workers is exploited to the advantage of the slavemaker species. These ants become slaves when workers from the slave-making ant colony attack the nests of the host species Temnothorax longispinosus, kill the adult ants, and steal the brood. Slave workers have to care for the brood in parasite nests, bring food to their masters and feed them, and even defend the nest. From the perspective of evolutionary history, the American slave-making ant Protomognathus americanus is an old social parasite that is entirely dependent on other ant species for its survival.
More than half of all animal species live in parasitic relationships, i.e. This presumably reduces the strength of the parasites in the area and thereby increases the chances of survival for the neighboring colonies populated by the slave ants' relatives. As a result, an average of only 45 percent of the parasite's offspring survived.
states of West Virginia, New York, and Ohio, enslaved Temnothorax longispinosus workers have been observed to neglect and kill the offspring of their Protomognathus americanus slavemakers rather than care for them. In fact, in three different populations in the U.S. According to the latest findings, however, this behavior now appears to be a widespread characteristic that is not limited to isolated occurrences. Susanne Foitzik of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany first observed this "slave rebellion" phenomenon in 2009. Ants that are held as slaves in nests of other ant species damage their oppressors through acts of sabotage.