Nell Greenfield Boyce

In the journal Current Biology, researchers in Japan...

describe how a female ant will sneak into a colony, creep up to its queen, and spray a chemical onto her.

This chemical has a dramatic effect.

It makes the colony's worker ants suddenly turn on their queen, who is also their mother.

The workers unwittingly betray her, attacking her until she's dead.

Then the female intruder becomes the new queen and uses the workers to raise her own offspring.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

It's hard for a young would-be queen ant to strike out on her own and try to establish a brand new colony.

So some ant species have evolved a way for female ants to basically take over existing colonies of another species.

In the journal Current Biology, researchers in Japan describe how a female ant will sneak into a colony...

creep up to its queen and spray a chemical onto her.

This chemical has a dramatic effect.

It makes the colony's worker aunts suddenly turn on their queen, who is also their mother.

The workers unwittingly betray her, attacking her until she's dead.

Then the female intruder becomes the new queen and uses the workers to raise her own offspring.

Nell Greenfield Boyce,

NPR News.

The Pleiades is also known as the Seven Sisters.

But even if you look with just binoculars, this cluster clearly contains a lot more than seven stars.

Luke Bauma is with Carnegie Science in Pasadena, California.