Beheaded ant

[Deansie26]

Some may not like this but I thought it was interesting, I was feeding my old Acromyrmex colony and one ant that I hadn't noticed got caught in the door and was be-headed. the ant with out a head was still able to right itself when I tried to over turn it etc, was very strange. Which means its balancing organs for detecting its position/ balance may be on its body.

https://youtu.be/7j2nqtHg6Nk

[Jackie62]

Talking of beheading, I found a lot of headless males the other day in the dump tank while cleaning it out....is this how the males are killed by any chance?

[Acromyrmexbob]

If you behead a male his sex organs immediately protrude. This can be used as a technique for artificial insemination. Work needing to be done I think. I mentioned elsewhere that you can knock out a queen with CO2 and then try to introduce a beheaded male with a view to mating them. I tried this with Acromyrmex once without luck.

At first read I was wondering why you would do this but I suppose it could be useful to obtain mated queens from 2 captive mature colonies, any other uses?