MATING comes at a price even queens must pay. A young leaf-cutting ant queen will gamble her own health for the chance to reproduce successfully in the long term.
It’s a high-risk strategy: in only a few hours, the queen must mate and store hundreds of millions of live sperm to use for the rest of her 30-year lifespan – all of which weakens her immune system. Then she must found her colony, exposing herself to all sorts of pathogens in the soil.
“If females mate too often and/or store too much sperm, they are unable to up-regulate their immune systems,” says Boris Baer at the centre…
