Social status and reproductive success in queenless ant colonies

Workers in queenless colonies of the ponerine ant Pachycondyla villosa establish linear or near-linear rank orders by antennation bouts and overt aggression. In these hierarchies, top-ranking individuals were reliably among the most productive egg-layers, but several lower ranking workers also laid considerable numbers of eggs. Though many of the subordinates' eggs were eaten by the α-workers, we could show by multilocus DNA-fingerprinting that low-ranking individuals occasionally succeeded in producing adult males. However, the most dominant workers always had the highest reproductive success.