What is army ant adaptive syndrome?
Fig 3. Diagram showing the components of the army ant adaptive syndrome
Army ant adaptive syndrome is a suite of physiological, morphological and behavioural traits that defines army ant species (fig 3). It is comprised of a highly specialised wingless queen, obligate foraging behaviours such as mass raiding, and migratory behaviours such as nomadism and reproduction by colony fission (Kronauer, 2009). There are no army ant species that lack the syndrome and it has been shown that it arose in a single common ancestor and has remained unchanged for over one-hundred million years (Berghoff, 2003).