Some adult male ants have their rivals killed by smearing them with bodily fluids - effectively creating a bullseye marking them for assassination by worker ants.
A new study found that the ants use an ingenious and sneaky way to despatch potential mating rivals for the nest's queen.
For the first time, adult males have been observed targeting young ants fresh out of the pupa with a kiss of death.
The adult ants clutched their victims with their mandibles, then marked them with a mixture of faeces and other substances.
This marking then attracted worker ants, who bit the victim and pulled him apart.
"They let the workers do the dirty job of finishing off all the rivals," said Professor Jurgen Heinze at the University of Regensburg in Germany.
One marked ant managed to sneak past the workers, however, and paint a target on the older male as revenge.
The counter-attack worked, and the older male was killed.
Prof Heinze added: "We know that in other species, older males sometimes fail to kill rivals and then they will be overthrown."
The interest of his team was first piqued after they discovered a colony of ants with just one adult male in residence.
Within the nest were the dismembered corpses of 11 young males.
That led them to installing cameras in the nests of 10 colonies of a single Cardiocondyla species in Queensland, Australia.
The researchers are still puzzled why the adult males outsource the killing to the worker ants, rather than just killing their rivals themselves.
The results of the study are published in the Entomological Science journal.
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