An ant species with no males and no workers

Anyone who keeps ants knows the basic pattern: one queen, many workers, and a few males during swarming season. That is why a report from Japan surprised me. It describes a species that breaks this pattern completely.

The species is Temnothorax kinomurai. In this rare ant, only queens develop. There are no males and no workers. Young queens invade the nests of the related species Temnothorax makora, kill the resident queen and some of the workers with their stingers, and then have the surviving workers raise their offspring.

It was already known that this species lives as a parasite. What was unclear was whether its offspring really consisted only of queens. Keiko Hamaguchi of the Kansai Research Center and her team collected six colonies, including eggs and larvae, and raised them in the laboratory. Once all the young had matured, they determined caste and sex, and the result was clear: only queens were produced.

This is possible through parthenogenesis, meaning the queens develop from unfertilized eggs. Males are simply not needed. According to the researchers, the combination of parasitism without any workers of its own and parthenogenetic reproduction is unique among ants so far. Other parasites lack either workers or males, but never both.

Senior author Jürgen Heinze of the University of Regensburg calls the strategy unexpected but evolutionarily sensible: the species puts all its resources into new young queens. I find it striking how a discovery like this puts the image of the 'typical' colony into perspective, the image our hobby is built on. The study was published in Current Biology in 2026.

Source: scinexx