At Mating Time, These Ants Carry Their Young Queen to a Neighbor’s Nest

The royal matchmaking service may help these insects avoid inbreeding.

We humans have Tinder, Hinge, eHarmony and Grindr. For other animals, there’s a real dearth of matchmaking services, not even Bumble or Plenty of Fish. But for future queens of one ant species, sterile worker ants seem to serve this function by physically carrying their royal sisters to neighboring nests. There, the queens-to-be can mate with unrelated male ants, according to researchers in a study published this month in Communications Biology. “This is quite exciting,” said Jürgen Heinze, a zoologist at the University of Regensburg in Germany and a co-author of the study. “It’s the first case of this assisted mate choice and assisted outbreeding that we have in animals.”