Yesterday morning, students had the rare opportunity to witness the tail end of a nuptial flight of the Atta Cephalotes species of the leaf cutter ant. Professor Pinto led an impromptu lecture to explain what happened. Up to 20,000 ants flew out from each colony to participate in this mating ritual. The nuptial flight is synchronized with the other colonies in the area so that queens will have the chance to mate with males from other colonies. Queens are able to distinguish between males from her colony and ones from other colonies. The queen chooses males from other colonies so that her offspring will benefit from genetic variation. The sole function in life of the male participants in the nuptial flight is to mate with a queen. The photo below shows dying males. Most of the queens die after this ritual as well. The successful queens survive by finding a piece of earth to dig into where she will lay her eggs and start her fungus garden. The photo at the bottom is a hole dug by a successful queen. She is going to have a rough go of it in this location since it is at the edge of a gravel parking lot. The other queens dying in the parking lot were collected by our students to be used in their research.
Males dying after the nuptial flight.
Hole started by a young queen.
Young queens used for research.
do you know what day this was
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