Imagine being a queen ant, and you’ve just recently mated after the biggest night of
your life known as the ant nuptial flight, and you’re now on your way to becoming the
queen of your own colony.
You’ve settled into your founding chamber and are now waiting to lay your first batch
of ant eggs, which you can already feel developing inside you.
But in the coming days you notice that something just doesn’t feel right.
Some peculiar pains come and go within your gaster.
That’s funny, but perhaps this is all part of ant motherhood.
Over the next few days, the pains continue to grow stronger, and more unbearable, and
soon you feel your babies moving around within you… and wait… something’s definitely
wrong now.
You suddenly find yourself no longer able to breathe, and the pain is just excruciating.
It’s as if your “babies” are devouring your breathing organs, as well as all of your
insides.
It’s at this point you realize that something is very wrong.
In fact, you realize now that all this time, you haven’t been incubating your own babies.
You’ve been incubating something else, and it’s every queen ant’s nightmare.
You are moments from exploding and giving birth to alien babies that are not of your
species.
Welcome to the savagery of Mother Nature, and to the AntsCanada Ant Channel.
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So here I have a queen ant from my recent queen ant collection, that I highly suspect
is about to explode from endoparasitic maggots, i.e. ant fly larvae.
My other queens have gone on to lay normal ant eggs as usual, but this queen didn’t,
and is clearly incubating something else that has been growing inside her.
Now I’ve been struggling to decide how to deal with this situation, but thankfully,
in last week’s video, you guys helped me decide the ultimate fate of this infected
queen ant, so stay tuned as I carry out that fate, at the end of the video.
Of course, trigger warning: for all of you taking front row seats to witness the gore,
you will also see real footage of these endoparasitic maggots bursting forth into the world, so
brace yourselves!
But first, some of you might be asking: AntsCanada, how did these maggots end up in the queen
ant in the first place?
Well AC Family, let us now delve into the crazy world of ant endoparasites.
Ants have to deal with a variety of crazy endoparasites, endo meaning internal parasites.
These parasites are extremely specialized in infecting specific ant species.
Have a look at this real quick: The ant on the left is a healthy worker ant, but the
ant on the right is infected with a nematode species, i.e. roundworms.
Now AC Family, check out how the nematodes get into the ant in the first place!
The nematodes inside this worker ant cause the ant’s gaster to swell up and turn a
bright red colour.
And it just so happens that the ant’s now bright red gaster greatly resembles berries.
Then, a bird comes along and eats the ant thinking it’s a berry, the nematodes then
enter the bird’s digestive system, mate, breed, and lay eggs within the bird, then
the bird poops and with it releases all the nematode eggs, and as we’ve already seen
on the channel, ants love to eat bird poop, and the consumed bird poop with nematode eggs
gets taken back to the ant nest, where it is fed to the ant larvae and it is in the
ant larvae that the eggs remain until each larva matures into an adult ant, and the cycle
begins all over again.
Isn’t that just crazy?
This particular species of nematode requires both the ants and the birds in order to survive.
That’s how specialized they are!
So then how do maggots end up in a queen ant?
Well, AC Family, there are two possibilities.
The first possibility is that this queen ant may have consumed the eggs somehow at some
stage of her life, and it could have been as early as the larval stage like in the nematode
example you saw earlier.
But I suspect, it is probably highly unlikely that the queen did consume the eggs at larval
stage, because it does seem like the maggots require a queen host and unless the fly eggs
have some way of taking over the worker ants’ brains to ensure the eggs are fed to queen
ant larvae, then it seems the fly eggs have a not so good chance of scoring a queen among
the millions of worker ant babies.
I suspect the ant-parasitic fly uses a second method to get its maggots into the queen ant:
from the outside!
There are hundreds of ant-parasitic flies that only need a split second to lay their
eggs on the exoskeleton of an ant to parasitize them with its maggots.
For instance, we know of some 300 species of flies that are known as ant-decapitating
flies, of the genus Apocephalus, and one such species of ant-decapitating fly dive bombs
a fire ant, and in a split second lays an egg onto its exoskeleton.
The maggot hatches from the egg and burrows into the body of the fire ant where it further
develops and feeds on the ant’s insides.
Then when the maggot pupates, it enters the head, causing the head to fall off, and from
the fire ant’s dead head, emerges the adult ant-decapitating fly, ready to mate and begin
the cycle all over again.
So going back to this unlucky queen ant of ours, I highly suspect that if there are indeed
maggots about to explode from inside her, that they’re of a species of fly that 1)
specializes in parasitizing this particular species of carpenter ant, and 2) enters the
queen from eggs laid onto the exoskeleton of the queen ant during the biggest night
of her life, the nuptial flight.
My guess is an ant-parasitic fly laid some eggs onto this unlucky queen ant during her
nuptial flight and the tiny maggots that hatched from the eggs burrowed into her body and began
to feed on any ant eggs she might have had developing in her body as well as all her
innards.
And now AC Family, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for.
Let’s have a look at the gruesome process of the maggot explosion from a queen’s gaster,
shall we?
I hope you all are not eating right now.
Moments before the parasitic maggots are about to emerge, they can be seen seething and slithering
below the surface of the membrane of the queen ant’s gaster.
At this point the queen ant is dead because the maggots have eaten all of her insides
now.
The maggots are now compelled to burrow out of the queen’s body in order to pupate and
form cocoons for their next stage of development.
One maggot manages to chew through and peeks out into the world.
It emerges and begins to crawl around.
This begins a chain reaction of more and more maggots emerging from the hole, until suddenly
the queen’s body lies under a huge pile of seething maggots.
Ugh!
So gross!
I hate maggots and they make my skin crawl!
Sorry, this is my scolecophobia talking now, but hey, it’s science.
Let’s keep watching.
These large maggots are at their final larval stage and wander off the dead body of the
queen ant in search of a safe location to spin a cocoon and develop into adult flies,
which will then go on to breed and lay their eggs on other unsuspecting queen ants during
their nuptial flight.
So disgusting!
Thank God, I’m not a queen ant!
Now going back to our queen ant here.
Now that we know the possible fate of this queen, what do you think we should do with
her?
When I showed this infected queen in last week’s video, many of you left the same
comment saying the most ethical thing to do is euthanize this queen and relieve her of
her future suffering.
I mean, look at this post with two thousand likes!
Even your AC Senate, voted that we should go the humane route of euthanasia and save
her from her misery.
And so, you, the powers have spoken!
I even considered the possibility that this queen might actually have no parasites inside
her at all, despites the signs that she did, but even if so,
she wasn’t going to lay eggs, she wasn’t going to found her own ant colony, and she
was going to die anyway, and so AC Family, I really hated to do it, but it was for the
best.
I placed her into the freezer so she, along with any of the parasites within her, would
die by freezing.
Goodbye, queen ant.
Perhaps you’ll reincarnate and successfully found a thriving ant colony in your next lifetime.
In terms of the other queen ants, it seems eight of the 14 we caught a few weeks ago,
are well on their way to founding their own ant colonies.
Look at the size of the larvae now of Queen #6 from last week’s video.
It’s indeed the bittersweet story of nature, that some animals succeed to make it into
their later stages of life fulfilling their purpose in the ecosystem and making it far
enough to pass their genes into the next generation, while others become the sacrificial lambs
to allow other lifeforms to continue on.
Though we can all call these maggots horrid and gross, and trust me, I still find them
horrid and gross no matter what, inside I do know that the parasitic maggots don’t
really have a choice, regarding how their species proliferates in the world.
The maggots are just living the way nature designed them to be, and it just so happens
that nature designed them to kill off unlucky queen ants.
Perhaps they help in regulating ant populations.
I realized that in nature, there is no emotional bias.
Life only tends to survival and further promotion of life, and that’s just the way it’s
been for billions of years since life’s very genesis on the planet.
As I looked at the eight queens all tending to their respective first generation of worker
ants, I realized that Mother Nature, though at times savage, is still incredibly perfect
in design.
Thank you for watching and supporting the ants.
It’s ant love forever!
AC Family, did you enjoy today’s episode?
Did you learn something new?
Follow these continuing, real life ant stories by smashing that SUBSCRIBE button and BELL
ICON now, and hit ALL so you get notified at every upload.
Also don’t forget to hit the LIKE button every single time including now.
It would really mean a lot to me, guys.
Thank you!
AC Inner Colony, I have left a hidden cookie for you here, if you would like to watch extended
play footage of the maggots bursting forth from the queen ant.
Go check that out if you dare!
And guys, did you know that it’s anting season in the Northern Hemisphere, and you
don’t even need to leave your home to start an ant colony?!
You can catch pregnant queen ants from the safety of your own backyard, balcony, or open
window starting this month!
Be sure to visit AntsCanada.com for all your ant keeping and collecting gear shipped to
you in a special package from our ant-loving facility in the USA, so you can get the most
out of your ant keeping experience.
We ship worldwide and also offer full email support if you need our help!
We also have a helpful forum and ant colony trading marketplace on the site.
Visit AntsCanada.com today.
And now it’s time for the AC Question of the Week.
Last week, we asked:
What does a queen ant feed her first set of larvae?
Congratulations to Ugur Aksoy who answered:
A nutritious soup of her back muscle tissue that
powered her wings before she shed them.
Congratulations Ugur, you just won a free Ultimate Ant Keeping Handbook from our shop!
In this week’s AC Question of the Week we ask:
What type of flies belong to the genus Apocephalus?
Leave your answer in the comments section and you could also win a free Ultimate Ant
Keeping Handbook from our shop!
Hope you could subscribe to the channel as we upload every Saturday at 8AM EST.
Please remember to LIKE, COMMENT, SHARE, and SUBSCRIBE if you enjoyed this video, to help
us keep making more.
It’s ant love forever!