Everyone’s a queen: The ant species with no males or workers

A parasitic species of ant from Japan is the first ever found to have done away with both males and female workers – instead, every individual is a queen that tries to take over the nests of other species.

Typically, ant colonies consist of a queen, female workers and short-lived males that die after mating.

For more than 40 years, researchers have suspected that the rare parasitic ant Temnothorax kinomurai only produces queens, but until now there has been no definitive proof.

Young queens of this parasitic species take over the nests of a related species, Temnothorax makora, killing the host queen and some workers by stinging them. They then reproduce asexually, producing cloned offspring in a process called parthenogenesis, which is rare in ants but common among some other insects. The T. makora workers are duped into helping raise the young T. kinomurai queens.

Jürgen Heinze at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and his colleagues collected six colonies with T. kinomurai queens and reared them in artificial nest boxes in the lab. From these colonies, they were able to breed and raise 43 queen offspring in the lab. Inspection of their genitalia confirmed that there were no males.

These 43 queens were then given the opportunity to take over colonies of T. makora. Seven queens survived and succeeded in their coup attempts. They produced another 57 offspring, which were again confirmed to be all female queens.

“They exhibit an entirely new form of social organisation, adding another exciting dimension to the already rich and varied world of ants,” says Heinze.

Invading colonies of other species is a risky strategy, as shown by the high failure rate of queens seen in this study. But if all your offspring are queens, you have more chances to start new reproductive colonies.

“If parthenogenesis evolves due to random mutation, as in T. kinomurai, queens can produce 100 daughters, which do not need to mate – hence, there are 100 queens that try to found a new colony,” says Heinze. “Obviously, the success of parthenogenetic queens is higher than that of sexual queens.

“This species may be considered the final step in the evolution of social parasitism, highlighting the enormous flexibility in the life histories of social insects,” he says.