More commonly, ant species prefer to take the non-cannibalistic route towards social feeding, with the workers sharing bits of solid food they’ve collected with each other and the queen.
Known as ‘non-destructive parental cannibalism’ because the young don't end up dead, just full of holes, this behaviour sees scores of worker ants gorging themselves on the vital fluids of the colony's young before regurgitating it up and feeding it to the sedentary and wingless queens. Species belonging to the Amblyoponinae subfamily of ants from Madagascar have earned the nickname ‘Dracula ants’, thanks to a social feeding system that involves the queens and workers feeding off the blood, or haemolymph, of their young.
Time to dust off those tuxedos and meet me at the Blood Bar in five, because we’ve got six new species of Dracula ants to discuss.
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