Okay, this ant colony is just absolutely messed up. When I obtained this colony from a firewood log to save the ants from a fiery demise, they only had a single egg layer. In late February, I noticed some really broken behavior from the colonys’ male alates. The males were attempting to mate with queen alates from the same colony, which, in the vast majority of ant species, doesn’t happen at all. Fast forward to a couple of nights ago, and I peeked into the old and moldy nest of this colony. After a few seconds, I noticed that there were TWO wingless queens. I realized that this shouldn’t even be possible for this species, which is why I was so perplexed.
Once I found out about the mystery queen, I searched online for quite some time to make sure that nobody else had documented an instance of this phenomenon before. Aside from this colony, there is just one documented instance of colonies gaining queens from their own brood when they do not double clone (a process via which a few ant species can safely gain many queens even if they started a colony with just one because the founding queen can create genetically unrelated queens and males.) That was a completely different species, Solenopsis Molesta, but that colony already had at least four queens upon capture. Operation Yeetus on the other hand, the Nylanderia colony that is displaying similar behavior, did not have multiple queens when caught. The only reason this queen could have possibly been fertilized is due to the bizarre behavior of those male alates from earlier.
The most significant piece of evidence that this new queen is in fact actively laying fertile eggs is that just yesterday, I managed to photograph the second queen just as she was laying an egg. Immediately after, a worker placed it in an egg pile, confirming that this new queen is fertile. I also saw her lay another egg just a few minutes later.
This colony could be in for a massive population increase soon. . .
