While true, as a mother and environmental studies major, that wasn't the most important detail to me.

A. Human women become chimeras when they carry a fetus.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8155153

B. It's the reason for the headline -- their weird chimeric males -- but it seems more important to me that it facilitates invasive behavior by allowing a single ant to start a new colony.

YMMV, of course, and probably will.

Don't lots of species store sperm? I see nothing too remarkable about a single individual being able to start a colony unless no species do store sperm.

I have asked around. It appears you are correct.

There are other known ways of one individual being able to start a new population:

- The simplest and most obvious way to do this is to be a clonal organism.

- But you can go more complicated than that. You can have a female parthenogenetically give birth to males and then mate with those males. Aphids do this. (Actually, some cursory research suggests that aphids are more likely to give parthenogenetic birth to a batch of sons and daughters who then mate with each other?)

That species from other families do it does not make it less remarkable that these are the only ant species to do it.

Suzanne Sadedin and Aeon are wrong to have written that a human female [or any animal (seahorse) regardless of sex] becomes chimeras when they carry a fetus even when the foetal cells are so invasive that colonies can persist in the parent. Chimera, etymologically meaning female goat, has been given different meanings in different organisms, but the mother child case specifically is called (fetomaternal) microchimerism, which also occurs similarly in the child due to the presence of maternal cells for some finite period, thus not chimerism or a chimeria.

By that (fetomaternal) microchimerism standard all human children are chimeras when they are born. The features of (fetomaternal) microchimerism would be better defined in the temporal dimension as a temporary genotype addition with respect to the lifespan of an organism.

Not unheard of, just rare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_chimera

And worth noting that if all goes well, you'd never know you were chimeric.

Unheard of. The wikipedia article is about individual flukes not species norms. This was covered in the article.

A human chimera would not have some cells with a genome from one parent and other cells with a separate genome from the other parent. That's not the way human reproduction or genetics works.