[DoreenMichele]

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.

[downvotetruth]

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.

[Brian_K_White]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

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?)

[ovi256]

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

[DoreenMichele]

I have asked around. It appears you are correct.