Carpenter ant tending his aphid garden
*her
DO NOT MISGENDER THE ANTS.
Seriously I keep seeing this and it’s annoying as hell. Ants are so cool and their reproductive and social systems are so unique and dumb people who don’t do their research/don’t care keep ignoring it!
Come on guys, think about how sick ants are – a colony is just one big old family of sisters and half sisters working together for their mom, while their brothers hide out and wait for the day they get married off (and probably die shortly after). Obviously that’s a huge amount of anthropomorphism but still! Ants and bees and wasps are so fucking cool the way they are, stop making them all dudes because you find it more comfortable.
Obviously sex and gender aren’t the same thing, but given that it’s basic practice to align them a certain way for animals it’s MIGHTY SUSPICIOUS how consistently it’s decided that the badass warrior insects are ALWAYS gendered male, even in the face of usual standards 😛
Okay, but is there a binary distinction between the majority “female” warriors/caretakers + the Queen vs. the males mated to the Queen?
Does a system of three “sexes” work better?
Three genders, you mean? “Sex” only biologically refers to the type of gametes an animal produces/could potentially produce, and though workers are typically infertile, throwbacks that produce eggs do exist/have the potential to exist in many species – so, they are female. At a genetic level, male hymenopterans are pretty drastically different: rare among animals, they are haploid (only one set of chromosomes), not diploid. This is actually the big reason social hymenopterans are all female – they share ¾ of their mother and sisters’ DNA, instead of just half! Meanwhile a male, only shares ¼. There just isn’t as much reason to protect their brothers, or have brothers to begin with.
In Hymenoptera, female is just the default. Raised as a female in a human society where male is default, I understandably find this pretty awesome.
Should queens, workers and soldiers count as separate genders? Or should this just be considered a caste issue? That’s a question for fictional worldbuilding, more than one relevant to actual ants. And believe you me, it is one I have thought very hard about.
This is also why I always say that neither birds nor bees are very good analogies for human sexuality; but especially not bees. There is no human society where the standard family unit is a woman and her 50,000 daughters.
Mooncustafer 