Why do slave ants kill slavemakers?

Описание: In this video, we talk about our research on slavemaking ants and their hosts (slaves). The slavemakers are of one species (P. americanus) and the hosts (slaves) of another species (T. longispinosus). Host ants can be captured by the slavemaker ants, and these captured ants (slaves) normally work for the slavemaker queen. But recently, it was found that they sometimes kill slavemakers. It is unclear why they do this, because they probably cannot reproduce.

The research is described in the paper: "Oh sister, where art thou? Indirect fitness benefit could maintain a host defense trait"
by
Tobias Pamminger, Susanne Foitzik, Dirk Metzler, Pleuni S. Pennings
which can be found here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0790

Susanne Foitzik, who is a professor in Mainz (and previously in Munich) and her students and colleagues have been working on this slavemaker-host system for many years. Another video of our work is here:
   • Raiders from the sky: slavemaker founding ...  

The music was taken from the Free Music Archive: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Adv...

Pleuni Pennings made the video (http://pleunipennings.wordpress.com/), with help of Tobias Pamminger.