Sex ant
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For those who think spring is all about robins arriving, or window cleaning or crocuses budding, I have two words for you: ant sex. This is true. But when the days lengthen and the earth warms, the thoughts of a select class of ants turn to passion. An ant queen produces all of the other ants in the colony. The vast majority of them are sterile female workers, but at certain times of the year she also produces males, as well as some females capable of laying eggs themselves. These future queens and their mates have a startling characteristic not shared by other ants in the colony.


Ant workers selfishly bias sex ratios by manipulating female development.




Ant Queens Boost Their Immune System with Sex
A queen ant formerly known as a gyne is an adult, reproducing female ant in an ant colony ; generally she will be the mother of all the other ants in that colony. Some female ants, such as the Cataglyphis , do not need to mate to produce offspring, reproducing through asexual parthenogenesis or cloning , and all of those offspring will be female. Queen offspring ant develop from larvae specially fed in order to become sexually mature among most species. Depending on the species, there can be either a single mother queen, or potentially hundreds of fertile queens in some species. Ants go through four stages of development: egg , larva , pupa sometimes cocoon, called metamorphosis depending on the species and adult. During this stage, the level of care and nourishment the larvae receive will determine their eventual adult form.



A non-destructive method for identifying the sex of ant larvae
Have you have seen ants this year? One of somewhere between 12, and 20, species , they are the scourge of gardeners — but also fascinating. The small, black, wingless workers run around the pavements, crawl up your plants tending aphids or collect tasty morsels from your kitchen. Ants have a caste system , where responsibilities are divided. The queen is the founder of the colony, and her role is to lay eggs.





Kin selection theory predicts that social insects should perform selfish manipulations as a function of colony genetic structure. We describe a novel mechanism by which this occurs. First, we use microsatellite analyses to show that, in a population of the ant Leptothorax acervorum, workers' relatedness asymmetry ratio of relatedness to females and relatedness to males is significantly higher in monogynous single-queen colonies than in polygynous multiple-queen colonies. Workers rear mainly queens in monogynous colonies and males in polygynous colonies.


Not a true boner at all - a stunt boner, if you will.