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Mirror turtle ants thrive by going undercover

"I did a true double-take when I first saw this new species," said Scott Powell.

By Brooks Hays
A mirror turtle ant returns home after a spy mission. (Scott Powell)
A mirror turtle ant returns home after a spy mission. (Scott Powell)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 (UPI) -- Occasionally, humans will assume different identities -- accents, mannerisms, clothing -- in an attempt to stealthily blend in with separate groups. It's a technique largely employed by secret agents and members of law enforcement, usually employed to glean information or ensure a drug charge sticks, but it's safe to say the survival of the human species doesn't depend on subterfuge.

The same can't be said of mirror turtle ants, however, a newly discovered species of ant that locates food sources by assuming the identity of its neighbors and following them to their spoils. As a new paper, published this week in the journal The American Naturalist, demonstrates, Cephalotes specularis are a species of spies, capable of looking and acting like their neighbors.

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Dr. Scott Powell, an assistant professor of biology at the George Washington University, discovered the mirror turtle ants while observing a colony of regular turtle ants (Crematogaster ampla) in Brazil. Powell noticed what appeared to an invading ant, and was surprised when the nearby turtle ants -- a normally aggressive species -- neglected to attack.

"I did a true double-take when I first saw this new species," Powell explained in a press release. "As I turned away, after seeing what appeared to be large numbers of host foragers, it registered that a couple of the ants I had just laid eyes on were not quite like the others. Turning back around, I managed to re-find the few peculiar ants in the masses of host ants, and everything followed from there."

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Powell soon noticed there were several of these almost identical ants, blending in seamlessly with the rest of the colony. Further analysis confirmed that these ants were indeed members of a separate species and that they were present in almost every turtle ant colony he observed.

"Beyond the fascinating biology of this new ant, we appear to have a rare window into the early stages of the evolution of social parasitism, before the parasite has lost much of its free-living biology," Powell said. "This promises to help us better understand the general pressures that tip a species towards a parasitic lifestyle."

Powell is planning to return to Brazil in 2015 to continue studying the mimicry techniques of the mirror turtle ant.

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