Unidan, AKA Ben Eisenkop, is an ecosystem ecologist who first rose to fame (infamy?) on Reddit by popping up in posts across the site, answering any queries and concepts pertaining to biology and ecology. Eisenkop is a columnist for Upvoted, where he’ll be spotlighting a new creature every week.

Countless insects store food, which makes sense, right? You need to survive through lean times and you can’t just eat everything in one go, so you put some away. Some insects have little underground food “cupboards” that they can uncover. Some even store away live prey, like some wasps do for their offspring. However, very few turn themselves into living refrigerators for their families.

Enter the honeypot ants. Honeypot ants comprise five genera of ants found in arid areas of North America, Africa, and Australia. While the ants differ quite a bit from species to species across the globe, they have one shared trait: they become living food stores.

Everyone knows that ants are cooperative and have specialized jobs (i.e. castes) within their colonies, but in the science world, we refer to them as “eusocial.” This means that they have multiple generations living together, share the tending of offspring and divide labor among reproductive and non-reproductive groups. While the majority of eusocial organisms on Earth tend to be insects, we do have a few other examples, such as naked mole rats, which are quite bizarre, too!

Back to the honeypot ants: The division of labor within their species has evolved in such a way that when a worker is born within the colony, other workers, when sharing food may intentionally overfeed their sisters, causing an expansion in their abdomen. As they continually get overfed, they eventually lose mobility until they are quite literally a furnishing of the nest, sometimes even affixed to the ceiling like a chandelier!

When times are tough for the ant colony, workers can rely on the honeypot workers as reserve food, water and fat. By stroking their antennae, the honeypot workers will regurgitate provisions to the other ants. But why do the honeypot ants let this happen to themselves? The answer lies in their genetics. Humans have two sets of chromosomes, one from our mother and one from our father, making us what is called “diploid.” Ants (and all other members of the order Hymenoptera, for that matter) are what is called “haplodiploid,” meaning that males develop from unfertilized eggs while females develop from fertilized ones.

What this does is make some interesting peculiarities arise. For example, a male ant has no father; however, he does have a grandfather (i.e. the male that fertilized the egg that became the queen ant). It also means that sisters in many ant colonies are more related to each other than they would be to their own individual offspring. Thus, evolutionarily, it is more beneficial to help the queen produce more workers than to attempt to reproduce yourself. So, to the honeypot ants, giving up their mobility in service of the queen and colony is (evolutionarily) a very noble pursuit.

These ants are incredibly valuable to the colony as a whole, so much so that other ant colonies may send in raiders to steal the honeypot ants for their own colony, enslaving them for their own purposes. Here’s a video from the BBC showing a raid on a honeypot ant colony:

While we may feel bad for enslaved ants, humans utilize honeypot ants, too! Many indigenous cultures such as the Aborigines of Australia or the natives of Mexico utilize the honeypot ants as a delicious, sugary snack. On a personal note, while I haven’t eaten honeypot ants, I have eaten termites which are related to ants which tasted eerily similar to Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, except, you know, they were trying to bite my tongue and crawl out of my mouth. Bon appétit!