Male ants function like flying sperm. Only having one genome copy means every one of their sperm is genetically identical to themselves. And their job is over quickly, dying soon after mating, although their sperm live on, perhaps for years. – essentially their only job is to reproduce.
The queens of some ants are particularly long-lived and have the potential to produce millions of offspring during their life. To do so, queens store many sperm cells, and this sperm must remain viable throughout the years of storage.
Ant queens mate on a single occasion early in life and store millions of sperm cells in their spermatheca. By carefully using stored sperm to fertilize eggs, they can produce large colonies of thousands of individuals.
Starting a New Colony
Once mated, the queen never mates again. Instead of repetitive mating, she stores the male's sperm in a specialized pouch until such time as she opens the pouch and allows sperm to fertilize the eggs she produces. After mating, queen ants and male ants lose their wings.
“The queen will use the sperm she's collected in her sperm storage organ for the rest of her life. If she runs out she will lose her fertility and the whole colony will be doomed.”
Ants have a haplodiploid sex-determination system, where females are diploid and develop from fertilized eggs (sexually) and males are haploid and develop from unfertilized eggs (arrhenotokous parthenogenesis). However, a handful of ant species can produce female offspring parthenogenetically.
Ants don't have complex emotions such as love, anger, or empathy, but they do approach things they find pleasant and avoid the unpleasant. They can smell with their antennae, and so follow trails, find food and recognise their own colony.
Ants adhere to a caste system, and at the top is the queen. She's born with wings and referred to as a princess until she takes part in the nuptial flight, mates with a male ant, and flies off to start her own colony.
Each ant begins its life cycle as an egg. The colony's queen lays the ant eggs, which typically hatch within one to two weeks of being laid.
The queen is responsible for reproduction, while workers maintain the colony—caring for the young, foraging and hunting for food, cleaning, and defending the nest. In many insect societies, when the queen dies, the entire colony dies along with her due to the lack of reproduction.
If an ant lays an egg, it's female. If it does nothing but lay eggs, it's not only a female but also the queen ant. Male ants are typically smaller than females with smaller heads but longer antennae.
Most ants you see are female
The queen is the founder of the colony, and her role is to lay eggs. Worker ants are all female, and this sisterhood is responsible for the harmonious operation of the colony.
Every ant colony has one or more queens. Even though the worker ants are female, the queen is the only ant that can lay eggs. They have highly evolved social systems with three different castes ~ queens, males, and workers. The workers are female, but cannot reproduce.
Ant colonies usually consist of large numbers of workers and a single queen, who is the only female to reproduce. In most ant species, haploid males are produced asexually, whereas sex is used to produce diploid females that develop into either workers or new queens.
Most insects reproduce oviparously, i.e. by laying eggs. The eggs are produced by the female in a pair of ovaries. Sperm, produced by the male in one testis or more commonly two, is transmitted to the female during mating by means of external genitalia. The sperm is stored within the female in one or more spermathecae.
A recent study of ants' sleep cycle found that the average worker ant takes approximately 250 naps each day, with each one lasting just over a minute. That adds up to 4 hours and 48 minutes of sleep per day. The research also found that 80 percent of the ant workforce was awake and active at any one time.
Ants transport their dead there in order to protect themselves and their queen from contamination. This behavior has to do with the way ants communicate with each other via chemicals. When an ant dies, its body releases a chemical called oleic acid.
The white “ant eggs” carried by workers when an ant colony is disturbed or moving are not the eggs but the pupal stage of complete metamorphosis. Ant eggs are almost microscopic. The larvae that hatch from them are helpless, grub-like young that the workers must feed and care for.
Despite the relative smallness of an ant's brain in comparison to humans, scientists consider the ant to have the largest brain of all insects. Regardless of how ant brains are rated, they can communicate, avoid and fight enemies, search for food, show courtship signals, and use complex navigation over long distances.
Unfortunately for the ants' colony, when the queen dies, the worker ants can only survive for a few months. The colony dies off rather quickly because the workers cannot reproduce. When there's no queen to lay eggs, the workers die off, and there are no new ones hatched to replace them.
New queens need solitude while already established ones need the company of workers. Newly mated queens are easy to care for. They simply need to be kept dark and with a source of water.
Even so, they certainly cannot suffer because they don't have emotions. If you heavily injure an insect, it will most likely die soon: either immediately because it will be unable to escape a predator, or slowly from infection or starvation.
It is likely to lack key features such as 'distress', 'sadness', and other states that require the synthesis of emotion, memory and cognition. In other words, insects are unlikely to feel pain as we understand it.
Army ants have very few means of communication relative to humans. Visually, they can tell night from day and distinguish almost nothing more than that. They can't even form an image of the world around them, relying on their senses of smell and touch for detecting vibrations.