In an ant colony, different workers have physical differences from each other despite them all having the same parents. What determines the difference in the workers?
In: Biology
For humans, baby’s always have a mix of both their parents genes, and most of their characteristics come from their DNA. Other living things don’t necessarily use the same scheme of mixing parental DNA for all offspring.
Ants, along with many insects, work differently. An ant egg that has been fertilized by sperm becomes a female ant. An egg that hasn’t been fertilized becomes a male ant. The queen mostly lays fertilized eggs, and only lays unfertilized eggs a once a year in preparation for mating season.
Once the female eggs hatch, how they are fed as larvae (babies) effects how they grow up. If they are fed special hormones, then they will grow up to be a queen. If they are not fed the hormones, they grow up to be workers. So the workers of the colony decide when to make a new queen, not the queen herself, because the workers are the ones feeding the larvae. This allows the workers to make a new queen if they need to replace her for any reason.
Latest Answers