virgin queens mate with their own sons? hard logic here

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If a woman has a son, she will be no more virgin. A virgin woman has a son?
Holy myth here.

Context:

When looking for mates, some ant species don’t venture far from the family tree. In colonies of an ant from the Philippines, pictured above (Cardiocondyla argyrotricha), newly mature males will fight to the death to mate with their sister-queens. But often, there aren’t enough males to go around. So to form new colonies, virgin queens mate with their own sons, researchers report in Naturwissenschaften. To make the discovery, the scientists set up 31 artificial ant colonies with an unhatched queen and a set of sterile female worker ants and watched for the emergence of unfertilized male and fertilized female pupae. In all the colonies, queens could not lay female eggs until after a son was ready to reproduce. They even filmed one mother-son pair in the act of mating. Such coupling in ants, wasps, and bees is rare because it usually produces large numbers of sterile males. But these Oedipal insects seem to have found ways to avoid that problem.

More:
http://news.sciencemag.org/plants-animals/2014/01/scienceshot-ant-queens-rob-their-own-cradles

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Type: Question • Score: 2 • Views: 701 • Replies: 9

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Disclaimer: I am not a biologist. This is what I think is the case: human eggs are usually fertilized inside the female body by sperm introduced by sexual intercourse (which, of course, robs a human virgin female of that status). Certain insect eggs can be fertilised inside or outside the female's body. It seems that virgin queens of Cardiocondyla argyrotricha can lay unfertilised eggs and produce male offspring from them with which the queen can mate (no longer being virgins thereafter)

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@contrex,

contrex wrote:

Disclaimer: I am not a biologist. This is what I think is the case: human eggs are usually fertilized inside the female body by sperm introduced by sexual intercourse (which, of course, robs a human virgin female of that status). Certain insect eggs can be fertilised inside or outside the female's body. It seems that virgin queens of Cardiocondyla argyrotricha can lay unfertilised eggs and produce male offspring from them with which the queen can mate (no longer being virgins thereafter)

Good reasoning.
What is it the use of "(To make the discovery, the scientists) setting up 31 artificial ant colonies"? The artificial ants are actually microcameras?

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@oristarA,

oristarA wrote:

What is it the use of "(To make the discovery, the scientists) setting up 31 artificial ant colonies"? The artificial ants are actually microcameras?

The colonies are artificial; the ants are real.

1 Reply

@contrex,

contrex wrote:

oristarA wrote:

What is it the use of "(To make the discovery, the scientists) setting up 31 artificial ant colonies"? The artificial ants are actually microcameras?

The colonies are artificial; the ants are real.

Well, that is cool.
I also failed to get " an unhatched queen". Unhatched? Is the queen still within her egg (like a chicken is still in her egg)?

1 Reply

@oristarA,

oristarA wrote:

Is the queen still within her egg (like a chicken is still in her egg)?

That is what 'unhatched' means - not yet hatched.

1 Reply

@contrex,

contrex wrote:

oristarA wrote:
Is the queen still within her egg (like a chicken is still in her egg)?

That is what 'unhatched' means - not yet hatched.

Well, nothing got improved here.
How could an unhatched queen have her sons since herself is still unborn?

1 Reply

All sorts of weird things happen in nature.

Quote:

Individual frogs have been observed to change their sex organs from female to male. This likely occurs when the population does not have enough males to allow procreation and is accomplished when a chemical trigger activates the sex gene to disintegrate the female organs and develop the male ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_reed_frog

Quote:

asexual reproduction, is the first key to an aphid's long family tree. With few exceptions, aphids in spring and summer are all females. The first wingless matriarchs hatch from eggs in early spring, equipped to reproduce without the need for male mates. Within a few weeks, these females produce more females, and soon after that, the third generation arrives. And so on, and so on, and so on. The aphid population expands exponentially without the benefit of a single male.

In some circumstances, aphids gain an advantage by switching to more traditional means of reproduction. All would be for naught if the aphids in cold climates just froze to death at year's end. As days become shorter and temperatures fall, aphids begin producing winged females and males. They find suitable mates, and the females lay eggs on perennial host plants. The eggs will carry on the family tree, producing next year's first batch of wingless females.

http://insects.about.com/od/truebugs/p/aphidsreproduce.htm

1 Reply

@oristarA,

oristarA wrote:

Well, nothing got improved here.
How could an unhatched queen have her sons since herself is still unborn?

There is a sequence of events...

Quote:

To make the discovery, the scientists set up 31 artificial ant colonies with an unhatched queen and a set of sterile female worker ants

... and in these colonies, after the queen hatched they observed her.

0 Replies

@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

a chemical trigger activates the sex gene to disintegrate the female organs and develop the male ones.

I hope that (a) scientists don't develop such a trigger for humans and (b) if they do, it doesn't get into the water supply.

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virgin queens mate with their own sons? hard logic here

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