Flying Ant Day: the Q&A you didn’t know you needed
An American: You guys have something called Flying Ant Day. Is this some kind of national holiday?
A British person who is tired of ants: I can see how you’d get there, given the past 14 years of British politics. Quite the opposite, though: it’s the summer day we all dread because unlike other commemorative days, Flying Ant Day is always a surprise. For a few weeks leading up to the event, British publications are stuffed with headlines including “When is flying ant day?”, “Is it flying ant day?” and “Flying Ant Day has arrived“.
Okay but I just looked online and it says Flying Ant Day is a myth.
More misnomer than myth. Does it happen for all ants on the same single day? No. But many colonies do use environmental signals to coordinate their flight, a strategy that minimises any given individual’s odds of being eaten by predators.
Ants turn out to be very good at predicting the weather, and they’re looking for a specific kind of warm and windless day to take flight en masse. So most British people are guaranteed the following experience: one sunny day in mid-summer, usually in July or August after a generally unpleasant wet and warm spell, you’ll step out of your house and find something wriggling in your hair. You’ll grimace and pick it out and then you will notice masses of ants writhing on the ground all around you. Then – as in any good horror movie – your gaze will pan up and take in the flying ant orgy in the sky, as far as the eye can see.
That’s horrible! And I have so many questions. Ants can fly?
They can.
These are normal ants? How do they just suddenly sprout wings?
Flying ant day happens when colonies that live under the ground, or in my kitchen, get too big. Things get overcrowded. Then biology has a plan. The queens stop laying only their fertilised eggs, which are the ones that normally hatch into the typical female worker ants we all know and love. Instead, they now begin to lay unfertilized eggs, which hatch into male ants. And these come off the factory floor with a shiny set of wings.
Then everyone swarms out. The smaller flying man ants are accompanied by big juicy flying queens the main Queen has also produced, known as virgin queens. These also have wings. Now it’s time for sky sex.
Sky sex? The ants that are flying are also having sex? Mid-flight?
That’s the entire raison d’etre of Flying Ant Day. It is also known as the nuptial flight.
Well, that almost makes it sound romantic.
Oh, it has all the elements of the best rom-coms. Him: a “single-purpose sexual missile” [1], who engages in “quick and violent mating” [2], and then immediately dies. Her: likes sunsets, chewing off her own wings after mating, and long walks crawling around looking for a place to dig a nest.
According to one researcher, “reproductive success and nest densities [depend on] … these behavioural patterns of ant sexuals.”
You only quoted him because he said ant sexuals.
I did.
Wait, sorry – she chews off her own wings?
Well, she’s off to be the queen of her own nest, which is underground where no one needs wings. All that vigorous sky-sex has given her all the, er, material she needs to produce the drones she needs to establish her new underground colony.
Which will all be female?
That’s right. They’ll hatch from the fertilised eggs we were talking about earlier, and become her wingless, sterile female workforce.
Wait, I’m sorry, I’m really confused now. I get how the queen got pregnant, because she’s just been having sky sex.
Sky sex.
But how do her subsequent eggs get fertilised if her colony mates are all female, and she’s chewed off her wings?
I am so glad you asked.
Oh no –
Because she keeps all the sperm from that one magical night for the rest of her life, which can be 15 years. In a special pouch in her abdomen called the spermatheca. For 15 years.
God I wish I didn’t know that. But I’m still confused. Don’t the man ants grow from unfertilised eggs? How does that work biologically?
What am I, a professor of ants?
You’re the one who wrote a Q&A.
Well, there’s a limit to how much of an online PhD I’m willing to pursue to answer your questions about ant reproductive dynamics. Here is a relevant link from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
California? They have flying ants in California? The way you people go on about this, I thought it was just British ants that can grow wings?
Flying ants appear to exist in many subtropical or tropical regions. They are in the US and South Africa, allegedly, but simply not in the numbers we see in the UK.
What kind of numbers are those?
According to one estimate, the UK has one quadrillion ants.
Where did you find that number?
A pest control company on the internet. However, it seems legit, because every summer these numbers are matched by one quadrillion articles in British tabloids.
Do they bite?
They’re horribly venomous! Oh you meant the ants. Yes, but apparently they can’t hurt us.
So why do British people get so upset about Flying Ant Day?
You see, the thing that’s bad about ants flying around en masse is that you have ants flying around en masse. And I do mean masse. Last year, a mile-long swarm of them was so dense it registered as rain on a weather service radar. In 2017 and 2018, they got in players’ hair and mouths and ruined Wimbledon. Seagulls and other birds gorge on them and then get drunk on the formic acid content and start acting like British tourists on holiday.
Well, at least it gives British people an excuse to complain about good weather.
I think you’re on to something. Flying ants exist all over the world, but no other country is as obsessed with them as we are. In many ways, flying ant discourse is just a nuclear extension of weather discourse. And you know what British people are like with weather discourse. Spirited complaints, dour predictions, finer points-making and generally all-around obsessing. One year, the Royal Society of Biology – “the leading professional body representing many of the learned societies and other organisations making up the diverse landscape of the biological sciences“, which advances education, advises governments, and influences policy – conscripted citizen scientists into counting flying ants. Some absolute maniac even tried to coin a new term for flying ants: “flants”.
Wow. You might almost say Flying Ant Day deserves its own, say, commemorative …
No, don’t be ridiculous. It’s not like anyone is trying to make it into a national –
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[1] May R. Berenbaum (1996) Bugs in the system: insects and their impact on human, p.67
[2] Edward O. Wilson (2000), Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, page 141
[but let’s not kid ourselves, I found those quotes and their references on wikipedia]
Image Credit: Youssef Aouni, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons