Slave system in the animal world

It turns out that slavery is not exclusively a human type of social structure. On Earth, there are other living creatures that practice parasitic actions in relation to their own kind. It will be about some species of ants that have evolved so much that their life is no longer possible without using the labor of ants of another species.

As you know, ants, along with termites, bees and wasps, are social insects. They live in large colonies, together they build housing, get food and raise offspring. But some of them do not want to work on their own. Using numerical superiority, they capture slaves for themselves. Such, for example, are the bloody ants that live in our country. This species is used as slaves by brown forest ants, who do not live in ant hills, but in underground nests. Bloody intelligence ants find the home of their future slaves and report this to others. Then the invaders form a whole detachment, which goes for prey. The purpose of the trip is cocoons of brown forest ants. Having attacked the nest, bloody ants break through to the chambers where the white cocoons are stored. The hosts defend themselves fiercely, trying to transfer eggs to deeper parts of the nest, but, as a rule, are not able to withstand larger and suddenly attacked bloody ants. As a result of the battle, a large number of brown ants die, and slave owners abduct part of their future offspring.

Hatched brown ants consider the anthill of slave owners to be their home and are beginning to carry out work to care for the offspring of their owners. Although the hosts themselves are involved in the protection of the anthill and the extraction of food, they even partially work on the cultivation of larvae.

But other ants-slave owners live in tropical areas of our planet, these are Amazon ants. The structural features of their jaws do not give them the opportunity to independently grow their larvae; they cannot feed them. Therefore, they resort to the capture of brown forest or red ants. Capture occurs according to the same scheme as that of bloody ants. And the abducted foreigners are raised by slaves captured the last time.

But there is another type of social parasitism among ants. For example, females of the same bloody ants penetrate the dwelling of brown ants and become mistresses there, killing legitimate rulers. They lay their eggs and live quietly there, and the working ants do not notice the forgery and raise ants of a different kind. And then there are incredible changes in the behavior of the captured working ants. They become as aggressive as their owners, and together with them make destructive raids on their anthills of their kind, stealing cocoons from there.

Red ants have also been observed to have a slave system in their communities. They sometimes occupy the homes of the same unfortunate brown forest ants, and sometimes they build their own anthills and lead a completely decent life.

The colonies and flocks of other animals also have elements of oppression and coercion towards their relatives. They are based, as a rule, on physical superiority and are not so massive. Well, some ants have achieved such perfection in the use of slave labor that they even lost the ability to reproduce independently: without their slaves they will not be able to feed offspring and eventually disappear.