Dirty, Dirty Ants.

(Click on the images to view them in MASSIVE SCARY-ASS ANT MODE)

Day 2:
These images got me thinking about ants, about colonies, about...sex. And so I started to research Harvester Ants and their reproductive behavior, and I found it to be quite interesting.

Ants have a strange mating ritual. It seems both the queen ant and the "prince" (male) have wings, and when the mating urge hits, they fly 100-some feet into the air, do their ant-sex thang, then the male's wings fall off and he dies. The female then goes on to lay her eggs. Now, what if this happened in the human 'kingdom'? How strange that nature sometimes works on it's most basic needs, and then quickly erases what is not needed any longer (ie. male ants). Are the male ants like, "Awwww Yeeeah. Let's DO IT!! I don't care if my friggin wings fall off and I die afterwards. It's all worth a little meaningless ant-sex!" I don't know. Strange.


From: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050125090209.htm
"The population of harvester ants we study has an unusual 3-sex system. Recent work shows that this population, like other harvester ant populations nearby, is divided into two lineages. When a queen mates with a male of the same lineage, she produces female reproductives. When she mates with a male of the other lineage, she produces sterile female workers.

This kind of reproductive behavior is very different from what we expect to see in ant societies. We'd expect to see the same DNA sequence from all ants in a given colony. But that's not what happened here.

It didn't matter that the laboratory experiments mimicked the founding of a new colony, which depends heavily on workers and only needs one queen: when a queen and male of the same lineage mated, they produced eggs that would give rise to many queens. The results also showed that all of the eggs produced became workers when a queen mated with an alternate-lineage male."

WEIRD. REALLY WEIRD. White Collar Ants. Great.
Tune in next time for the upcoming design of the ants and their weird little world.