Most ant species are born into royalty. But for Indian jumping ants, female workers can fight for the crown. The catch? The winner becomes queen, but its brain also shrinks. In a study published ...

Even among ants, royal status is mostly an inherited affair. But for Indian jumping ants, a shot at wearing the crown is worth losing a bit of your brain for — especially as you'll always be able to ...

Whether fire ants bow to one queen or accept many rulers depends on one long strand of genes, a new study finds. The gene sequence is the first "social chromosome" ever discovered, according to study ...

The reproductive monopoly of the ant queen is not as strong as is often thought. Dr. Heikki Helanterä and Prof. Lotta Sundström, biologists working at the University of Helsinki, Finland, investigated ...

When it comes to deciding what harvester ant daughters will be when they grow up, mother queens hold considerable sway, according to a new study published online on February 14th in Current Biology, a ...

Ants are generally known as small insects that roam around in groups and work for their colonies, but what if some 50 million years ago, some species are as large as small birds? Indeed, there are, ...

James Gilbert receives funding from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme. Photos by Alex Wild (www.alexanderwild.com). Worker ants are a funny old bunch, of many shapes and sizes. But ...

If their bids at motherhood fail, they can then regrow their brains. By Annie Roth The Indian jumping ant, Harpegnathos saltator, has many talents. This inch-long arthropod, found in flood plains ...