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Unusual Reproductive Behavior Of Odd Ants Surprises Scientists

"The DNA of some of these ants was just weird – we certainly didn't expect to get the results that we did," Rissing said. "It seems that the queens in these colonies mate with males from two different genetic lineages. And when a queen and male with the same lineage usually mated, it usually produced a reproductive female – another queen. But when a queen and male from different genetic lineages mated, that pairing overwhelmingly produced a sterile worker.

"This kind of reproductive behavior is very different from what we expect to see in ant societies," he continued. "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.