Big Drones, Tandem Running, and Leptanilla Ants

Today I Learned:
1) Yes, a Star Destroyer will fly, but only if it's small enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWp9cGqHKiA

Note how they film -- what a cool setup!

2) Some ant species use a very particular form of signaling called tandem running. In tandem running, one ant grabs another one, getting its attention. The second ant moves behind the first ant and touches it with its antennae. The first ant then runs to wherever the second ant is needed, and as long as a)the second ant maintains contact and b) the first ant emits the right pheromone, the second ant will follow closely behind. If contact is lost, the first ant doubles back and looks for its mate, and the second ant begins a spiraling search pattern to find its leader.

There is exactly one known case of tandem-running between different *species* of ants, and that's the parasitic Polyrhachis lama. Polyrhachis build their own nests, but they also send workers to infiltrate nearby colonies of Diacamma rugosum ants. There are a few unusual things about this particular case of parasitism. For one thing, most ant parasites are very closely-related to their hosts, but this isn't the case with Polyrhachis. Also, Polyrhachis will leave their eggs and larva in Diacamma nests. Diacamma workers won't spend much time caring for the Polyrhachis young (and never appear to feed them), but they tolerate their presence... unless the Polyrhachis *workers* leave or are removed, in which case Diacamma start eating and removing Polyrhachis young after a day or two.

But I digress. Tandem running.

Diacamma use tandem running to move workers when new nest sites are constructed, and Polyrhachis has figured out how to follow tandem-running signals -- a Diacamma worker will cue a Polyrhachis worker to follow it, and the Polyrhachis worker will follow (clumsily) to the new nest site.

3) The most ancestral-known ant species, Leptanilla japonica (the only member of the family Leptanilla) is also one of the oddest.

Firstly, Leptanillae are tiny ants, measuring about a millimeter long, which according to E. O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler is small enough to move around in dirt, not by tunneling, but by just moving between dirt particles. Their size and habits make them very hard to find, and most mrymicologists never see one in the wild.

Leptanilla are rather odd-looking -- they look to me like someone drew a concept drawing of an ant, then one artist used the concept drawing to make Leptanilla and a different artist used the concept drawing to make all the other ants.

Leptanilla are social, but their colonies are fairly small, numbering around a few hundred individuals.

Leptanilla workers eat arthropods, particularly centipedes. They do this, despite being much smaller than your average centipede, by injecting a venom that paralyzes the centipede. The workers can then haul the centipede back to the nest, or, if the centipede is too big, relocate the nest to the centipede(!!!).

Note I say that's what the workers eat. The queen doesn't. The queen only eats the blood of her children. Seriously. Leptanillaean larva have a specialized organ called a "larval hemolymph tap", which is essentially a spigot allowing the queen to suck out the larval equivalent of blood (hemolymph). This is the only nutrition the queen receives once a brood has been established (I don't know what new queens do).