Slave-making ant
Theft of brood for the purpose of employing the stolen individual's efforts in support of the thief is called dulosis (from Greek δοῦλος, "slave"), but the term "slave-making" is used in older literature and is still common.
Some have argued that using such non-inclusive metaphors in science is harmful to scientists and interferes with the unbiased scientific process.
In laboratory tests, when captured workers were removed from colonies of Formica sanguinea and Polyergus rufescens, the behavior of F. sanguinea changed dramatically within 30 days of their removal, with workers becoming self-sufficient at feeding and brood care.
Workers of Polyergus, in contrast, were unable to care for their brood, and experienced high mortality.
When successful, the scout returns to its nest and recruits nest-mates to initiate the raid, during which slave-maker ants seize a brood and bring it back home.
[10] In most parasite species, workers mark the way to their nest with pheromones and afterwards fellow slave-makers are attracted within a few seconds.
[7] Rossomyrmex is the only reported slave-maker that exclusively uses adult transport and single recruitment chain instead of pheromones during raids, a behavior probably constrained by the arid habitat; raids take place in early summer when soil surface temperature can reach up to 30 °C (86 °F), a temperature in which pheromones would quickly evaporate.
[7] Most studies on the raiding behavior of species in the F. sanguinea complex confirm that slave raiders usually rout their opponents, who typically flee in a state of panicked alarm, and that aggressive encounters, when they occur, are brief and do not result in the death of adult individuals from either species.
[20][21] Slave-making behavior is unusual among ants but has evolved independently more than ten times in total[10] including in the subfamilies Myrmicinae and Formicinae.
Coevolutionary processes between slave-making ant species and their hosts then can escalate to an evolutionary arms race.
