‘Queen ants use mob tactics to reach top’
Getting to the top involves mean street level fighting, especially among queen ants, who resort to mob tactics to ensure their dominance, new research has found. Researchers from the University of Regensburg, Germany, studied the behaviour of an ant species L. Acervorum, in Spain.
In these colonies only a single queen was able to reproduce. All the other queens either did not yet have active ovaries or their ovaries had reverted to an inactive state.
The ants were observed fighting, both queen to queen, and worker ants to queens.
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Sheep use smell to recognise their family
Washington: Sheep are more clever than you thought — they are able to memorise faces of up to 50 fellow sheep and can recognise them two years later from their smell, a new study has found. An international team, led by the University of Western Australia, says despite having a cultural reputation for being unintelligent, sheep have excellent memories.
According to researchers, sheep use this capacity for long-term face recognition to distinguish between flocks and learn which sheep in their own flock are friendly and which are aggressive — this helps sheep position themselves within their flock’s dominance hierarchy. — PTI
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