The evolution of expendability: Why some ants traded armor for numbers

Ants with lots of workers tend to put less energy into making them armored.

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[Bill T.]

Who's "they"?

It's not "ant societies", as societies of any kind have no influence on natural selection.

And we wonder why non-scientists are confused about evolution. It's terminology like this. Yes, it's a handy shortcut for a complex topic, but it's so misleading.

What this research shows is that natural selection, in ants' current physical environment (temperature, humidity, water & nutrient availability, etc.), with ants' current set of predators, favors quantity (more workers per unit of nutrient) over quality (better equipped workers).

Change any of the conditions (predators, nutrients, etc.) and natural selection may work differently.

This just sounds like a super-creepy justification for some future "leader" to get rid of robust competition by killing off the strongest competitors. This is basically how animal & plant (seedless fruits, oversized veggies that can't survive without human intervention) domestication works.

With apologies to Hillary Clinton: It takes a colony to raise a larva.

The physical characteristics of an ant are not solely the result of its parents, but also of the workers that raise them. By moving larvae around, or feeding them different diets, the behavior of worker ants affects the ultimate form an adult ant eventually takes. In the extreme case, consider colonies with multiple castes, where the workers can vary in size by an order of magnitude, despite them being (half-) siblings.

And yes, sure, the workers' behavior is controlled by natural selection, but it natural selection at two levels: The phenotype resulting from each ant's genes, and the emergent phenotype of the colony as a whole, ultimately determine the reproductive success of the colony's genotype.