How Do Ants Reproduce?​

How Do Ants Reproduce?

Unlike mammals and other species, ants are peculiar in that their male and females do not all just mate with each other. The queen is the only female that can mate; all other females are workers. Most males exist for the sole purpose of reproduction and die shortly afterwards. The virgin queens and males are the only winged ants in a colony and are cared for by the workers. 

Workers are wingless female ants that enlarge the nest, excavate complex tunnels and carry the eggs to special hatching chambers. They also take care of the hatching larvae until they emerge to become workers themselves. There are at least three ways ants reproduce. These include swarming, asexual reproduction and budding.

Some species of ants such as the Mycocepurus smithi engage in asexual reproduction but every member of this colony are females and are clones of the queen. The most common form of reproduction in ants is swarming which involves the winged males and winged virgin queens leaving the nest during the mating season in what is referred to as the nuptial flight. 

They leave the nests in search of mates from other colonies for the sole purpose of reproduction. During nuptial flight, female queens tease the males by flying faster in order to determine which male is competent enough to catch up to her and father her children.

Although the queen copulates with several males during the brief mating period, she never mates again. Instead she stores the sperm collated from her mates in an internal pouch, the spermatheca, near the tip of her abdomen, where sperm remain immobile until she opens a valve that allows them to enter her reproductive tract to fertilize the eggs.

ant workers

After copulation, queen ants and male ants lose their wings. The queen then goes off in search of a site to start her nest. If she survives, she digs a nest, lays her eggs and raises her first brood comprising entirely of workers. A queen can stay fertilized for many years, laying millions of eggs over a long time.

Sex and function of an ant is determined by the queen. The sex is determined by fertilization where an unfertilized egg gives rise to a male ant and a fertilized egg hatches a female ant. The female ants are further divided into winged virgin queens and wingless worker ants.

The winged males exist only to fertilize the virgin queen on the nuptial flight after which they shed their wings and die in isolation. The queen ant produces a myriad of workers by secreting a chemical that retards wing growth and ovary development in the female larvae. It may take several years before a colony is large enough for the queen to start producing virgin queens and winged males that will leave the nest to start new colonies in other locations. 

With the hatching of winged males and winged females, a new cycle begins. Reproduction by swarming is common in most ant species all over the world. In single queen colonies such as in some fire ant species, the death of the queen means the death of the colony.

Colony budding occurs when a colony has multiple queens. During budding, one or more fertile queen leave an established nest with a group of workers in search of a new nest site. In the budded nest, the queens and workers retain their respective roles with the workers in charge of the establishment and care of the new nest. Difficult to control species such as Pharaoh ants, some Fire ants, Ghost ants and Argentine ants spread mainly by budding.

Author: Andrew Olagunju

Texas A&M University, Kingsville, Texas

Student Scholarships

Every year Thrive Pest Control hosts an essay contest and the reward is a 1-year scholarship at a 4-year university in the United States. This blog post is one of those scholarships.