Why It Sucks to Be Born as a Male Ant

[00:00:00]You hatch from an unfertilized egg. This is the first thing about you that is different. Every worker in the colony around you hatch from a fertilized egg, the queen's stored sperm combining with her eggs to produce daughters. You came from an egg the queen released without fertilizing. This is how ant colonies produce males. No father was involved.

[00:00:24]You are in genetic terms half an organism carrying only your mother's genes, no paternal contribution at all.

[00:00:33]You are a male ant and your existence has exactly one purpose. The colony does not invest in you the way it invests in workers. Workers are raised with care, fed specific nutrients at specific larval stages to develop into the cast the colony needs. Your development is different. You are fed enough to survive and to develop your wings and your reproductive system. That is the extent of the colony's colony's interest in you.

[00:01:02]You will not be taught anything. You will not be given a role. You will not contribute to the colony survival in any ongoing way.

[00:01:11]You have wings. This is one of the few ways you resemble a queen. The queen also has wings, which she will use once and then shed. You will use yours once, too. The difference is that after her flight, the queen will found a colony or join one and spend the next decade producing thousands of daughters. After your flight, you will die. You have functional eyes, better eyes than the workers, in fact, who navigate mostly by pheromone and touch. You need eyes because you need to find queens in the air. Your antennae are tuned specifically to detect queen pheromones.

[00:01:48]Your body is built for one afternoon.

[00:01:50]Skip forward. It is spring and the conditions are right. Warm temperature, low wind, high humidity, usually the day after rain, the colony sends you out.

[00:02:02]Not just you, hundreds of males from this colony alone, and from thousands of colonies across the region simultaneously. A coordinated emergence that overwhelms predator pressure the same way it does for queens.

[00:02:16]You are one of millions of males in the air at the same moment. You fly upward.

[00:02:22]Males typically aggregate at specific landmarks, hilltops, prominent trees, clearings, sites that queens also target. You find the aggregation and you wait, circling, searching. Queen pheromones drift through the air. You follow them.

[00:02:39]>> [clears throat] >> Here is what happens to most males at this stage. Swallows and swifts are also in the air. Dragonflies hunt the aggregation zones. Spiders have built webs at the aggregation sites. The males that emerge from the ground are picked off by birds before they even reach altitude.

[00:02:57]The males that reach altitude are hunted by aerial predators. You are protein.

[00:03:02]You are easy protein. You are slow flying, distracted by pheromones, not built for evasion. If you survive the aggregation and find the queen and mate, you die shortly afterward. The mating act itself is brief and the effort involved is physiologically exhausting for a body that was not built for anything afterward. Your internal organs begin to fail within hours. You have no fat reserves to speak of. You were never fed to build them. You were fed just enough to reach this moment. If you do not mate, you die anyway. You cannot return to the nest. The colony does not recognize you as a returning forager.

[00:03:43]Your pheromone signature marks you as a reproductive, not a worker, and the nest guards do not readmit reproductives after the flight. You are locked out of your own home. You land somewhere and you starve. The colony does not notice.

[00:03:59]You were never counted on to come back.

[00:04:01]The only meaningful thing that separates a successful male from an unsuccessful one is whether his sperm reaches a queen's spermatheca. If it does, those genes have a chance of appearing in future workers and future queens. The male himself contributes nothing beyond that moment. His daughters will not know him. His genes will persist, but he will not.

[00:04:25]Consider what the workers around you have in comparison.

[00:04:29]A worker ant in the same colony might live for 1 to 3 years, sometimes longer.

[00:04:34]She forages, tends larvae, defends the nest, expands the tunnels, and through all of this contributes to the survival of a colony that shares her genes. Her work produces results she can see in some functional sense. The larvae she tends become workers, the food she carries feeds her sisters. Her life is constrained, but it is not trivial.

[00:04:58]Your life is trivial in a specific way that is hard to overstate. You are a genetic delivery mechanism, a flying sperm packet with wings. The colony built you for this one function, and the function takes one afternoon and then you are done, whether you succeeded or not.

[00:05:16]There is something worth noting about the genetic mathematics here. Because you hatched from an unfertilized egg, you are haploid. You have one set of chromosomes instead of two.

[00:05:27]Every sperm cell you produce carries your complete genetic code. If you mate successfully, your daughter will carry your full genetic contribution plus half of her mother's. This makes you, in a strange way, more genetically concentrated than a diploid organism.

[00:05:44]But concentrated does not mean durable.

[00:05:47]You are intense and brief.

[00:05:50]Worker ants have a relationship with a colony that is ongoing and reciprocal.

[00:05:54]They give and they receive. The colony feeds them, protects them, and their work sustains the colony in return. You have no such reciprocity. The colony produced you as an investment in reproduction, not in you, but in the possibility that you might carry genes outward. You are an expenditure, not a member.

[00:06:15]And the colony does not even particularly care if you succeed. The colony sends out hundreds of males because the odds are that a few will succeed. Your individual success or failure is irrelevant to the colony's strategy. You are one of many attempts.

[00:06:30]Most attempts fail. The colony accounts for this by making more attempts. You do not account for anything. You are the attempt.

[00:06:39]Skip forward. You're in the air. The aggregation is dense and the predators are working through it efficiently.

[00:06:46]Queens rise from the ground and the males converge. You detect a queen pheromone at close range. You move toward it. You find her.

[00:06:55]The mating is brief, seconds, and then you pull away and you begin to drop.

[00:07:00]Your wings still work. Your body does not.

[00:07:03]You land on a leaf. You are not injured.

[00:07:06]You are simply finished. The internal cascade that follows mating has already begun. Organs beginning to shut down in a sequence that takes hours.

[00:07:16]You sit on the leaf while the aggregation continues above you. More males are finding queens. More males are being taken by swallows. The business of the afternoon continues without reference to you.

[00:07:29]By evening, you are still on the leaf.

[00:07:31]You cannot fly. You are not in pain as far as anyone can determine. Ants have nociceptors, but the evidence for what the experience is limited. You are simply slowing. Your legs move less. By morning, you will be still. Something will eat you. A beetle, a spider, another ant from a different colony. You will re-enter the nutrient cycle that produced you.

[00:07:55]The queen you mated with has already landed somewhere in the soil. She has shed her wings and is digging her first chamber. In her spermatheca, your sperm is stored alongside the sperm of every other male she mated with during the flight. Your contribution is in there, undifferentiated, waiting.

[00:08:13]She will produce workers from that stored sperm for the next 10 to 20 years. Some of those workers will carry your genes. Some of the future queens that emerge from that colony will carry your genes. If those queens mate and found their own colonies, your genes will persist further. This is the only way you continue. This is the only way you were ever going to continue. You were built for one afternoon. The afternoon happened. You are on the leaf.

[00:08:41]The colony that made you has already forgotten you existed.