Ants Really Aren't Nice : Even in the colony, it pays to have connections.(Brief Article)

If you've ever spent much time watching a colony of ants, you'd think they were the most selfless beings in the animal kingdom. But myrmecologists, the scientists who study ants, aren't so naive. How, they've long asked, could such an apparently selfless creature have survived the game of evolution, in which only the fittest flourish? Ants may be pugnacious toward those from other colonies, but within a single colony scientists have observed little sign of brutishness or double-crossing--the kind of thing you'd find in a typical human household. All they've seen is abject cooperation.

Now Minttumaaria Hannonen and Liselotte Sundstrom of the University of Helsinki have discovered a different side of the ant's personality, and it isn't pretty. According to their paper in last week's Nature journal, ants engage in blatant nepotism. The scientists first recorded the ...