WEEK 1 RELATING

A Little Something Extra

When you see an ant chances are its female. Most ants are female. An ant colony generally consists of one queen and hundreds or thousands of “worker” ants. These worker ants are all sisters—daughters of the queen. Sterile daughters of the queen.
An ant queen experiences two life-changing activities on the same day—flight and sex. When an ant colony is of a certain health and age, the queen produces fertile ants—both male and female. These fertile ants have wings. Lacy, transparent flight tackle. At certain times of the year colonies (of the same ant species) send out their winged fertile males and females. These ants pair with other opposite sexed ants from neighboring colonies for a “nuptial flight.” Sex happens on the wing then both drop back to earth—the male to die, the female to lose her wings, burrow, and begin a new colony.

Ant reproduction is perhaps more mysterious than ant sex. The queen ant stores sperm—which is why she only needs to have sex one time. She uses that sperm to fertilize her eggs—the eggs that develop into her daughters. Her sons (the short-lived flying lovers of the winged females) come from non-fertilized eggs. This means that while male ants have grandfathers, they don’t have fathers.

Ants have a genetic system called haplodiploidy. A fascinating and somewhat complicated system that I don’t want to (and truthfully can’t) explain fully here. But in the haplodiploid system the fertilized sister ants share ¼ of their genetic material from their mother’s side. This works like human biology. We receive ½ our genes from our mother and ½ our genes from our father. Of the genes we receive from our parents about 1/2 (1/4 from each parent) end up the same for each sibling—meaning we share about 50% of our genetic makeup with our siblings. So like human siblings, ant sisters share ¼ of their genetic make up on their mother’s side. But a male ant passes on its genetic material differently and ½ of what ants get from their father’s side is shared genetic material. So while human siblings again share ¼ of their genetic make up that comes down on their father’s side—ant sisters share ½ of their genetic make up from their father’s side. They end up with ¼ more genetic overlap with each other than do human siblings. So sister-ants share ¾ of their genetic make up.