I just bought an ant farm the other day and was thinking about the breeding activities of the industrious ant. They do not send a queen and so your ants will not reproduce, just eventually die. You also cannot mix ants of two different colonies together, even if they are the same kind of ants, for they will fight to the death. Ants who live in the wild never ever mix with other colonies.
A queen ant in the colony is the only ant that can breed. When the time is right she breeds a specific number of new queen ants and prince ants. Once they are mature they leave the nest, fly around, lose their wings and one queen will match up with one prince. Once they breed and start a colony of their own the prince dies and the queen will continue to produce offspring from that single coupling. Eventually, the cycle continues and she produces princes and queens to go forth and start new colonies.
So in essence, there are two ants, they produce many offspring, those offspring breed with each other and produce offspring which breed with each other. It is a huge case of multi-generational inbreeding, yet the ants don’t seem to suffer. When humans inbreed, genetic disorders that are generally recessive (and cancelled out by breeding with someone who does not have that trait) are suddenly amplified. You don’t see it so much in first generations but it becomes worse as they inbreeding goes on. Do ants have perfect genes? Do they not have recessive traits that could harm them? Or have the been doing this for so many millions of year that those ants with the bad traits and their entire bloodlines have died out and only the strongest ants survive?
Perhaps the ants genetic code is vastly dissimilar to a mammals and inbreeding isnt a problem.
Yes, this kept me awake for hours.