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Eusocial insects like ants and honey bees are multicellular animals that live in colonies with a highly organized social structure. Colonies of some social insects may be deemed superorganisms. [6] Animals, such as humans and rodents, form breeding or nesting colonies, potentially for more successful mating and to better protect offspring.
Termites are pale-coloured, soft-bodied eusocial insects that live in colonies, whereas cockroaches are darker-coloured (often brown), sclerotized, segmented insects. Within the colony, termites have a caste system, with a pair of mature reproductives, the king and the queen, and numerous sterile workers and soldiers.
Insects in social networks show many anti-pathogen behaviours to prevent the spread of infection. An example of this behaviour is the pathogen alarm behaviour in termites. [ 13 ] If a termite detects itself being infected with pathogen spores , it will produce a vibratory signal to warn the other colony members to stay away from it to prevent ...
Eusociality is distinguished from all other social systems because individuals of at least one caste usually lose the ability to perform behaviors characteristic of individuals in another caste. Eusocial colonies can be viewed as superorganisms. Eusociality has evolved among the insects, crustaceans, trematoda and mammals.
An ant colony is a population of ants, typically from a single species, capable of maintaining their complete lifecycle. Ant colonies are eusocial, communal, and efficiently organized and are very much like those found in other social Hymenoptera, though the various groups of these developed sociality independently through convergent evolution. [1]
Ant colonies can be long-lived. The queens can live for up to 30 years, and workers live from 1 to 3 years. Males, however, are more transitory, being quite short-lived and surviving for only a few weeks. [69] Ant queens are estimated to live 100 times as long as solitary insects of a similar size. [70]
Insects are mostly solitary, but some, such as bees, ants and termites, are social and live in large, well-organized colonies. Others, such as earwigs , provide maternal care, guarding their eggs and young.
Weaver ants live in trees (they are obligately arboreal) and are known for their unique nest building behaviour where workers construct nests by weaving together leaves using larval silk. [3] Colonies can be extremely large consisting of more than a hundred nests spanning numerous trees and containing more than half a million workers.