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A comment on Ants Seem to Defy Biology: They Lay Eggs That Hatch into Another Species. Parent comment

Re:Ants Seem to Defy Biology: They Lay Eggs That Hatch into ... by tsimionescu on Friday September 19, 2025 @12:16PM (#45303362)
To be fair, you almost always still need two individuals to get reproduction going - you just don't need to be as picky about which two individuals as you might think. There are a rare few animals that can sometimes self-reproduce, but it's not a common strategy in the animal kingdom, even among hermaphroditic animals.
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Re:Ants Seem to Defy Biology: They Lay Eggs That Hatch into ... by dekhn on Friday September 19, 2025 @12:50PM (#45303783)
Parthenogenesis is not uncommon in animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_taxa_that_use_partheno... (I am mostly quibbling with "rare few animals" but I can't really say much about the relative prevalence of parthenogenesis compared to sexual reproduction.
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Re:Ants Seem to Defy Biology: They Lay Eggs That Hatch into ... by duskwuff on Friday September 19, 2025 @12:52PM (#45303803)
They're less rare than you might think. Parthenogenesis ("virgin birth") occasionally occurs in some domestic birds, including chickens and turkeys. Due to the way sex determination works in birds, the offspring created this way are always male.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003257911...

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Re:Ants Seem to Defy Biology: They Lay Eggs That Hatch into ... by rsynnott on Friday September 19, 2025 @06:38PM (#45307587)
There are also a number of species of lizards, and one snake, which reproduce exclusively via parthenogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_squamates

In some though not all such species, there are no known male examples _at all_ (though in reptiles some forms of parthenogenesis can produce males).

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Re:Ants Seem to Defy Biology: They Lay Eggs That Hatch into ... by dexterdog on Friday September 19, 2025 @06:56PM (#45307746)
Thank you so much for introducing me to this concept. I knew the word thanks to Shriekback. I used to have ducks. At one point when I only had 3 females, I found a broken egg with a fetus in it. I knew they were all female, but couldn't convince anybody of what I saw.
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