Unintelligent Design - When Black Ants Fly To Get The Best Mate

Winged female unmated black ant, Lasius niger, or female 'alates' attended by workers.

Black garden ant alates, Lasius niger
Female (left) and male (right).

Ant Ark
©Brian Valentine

Still suffering from COVID-19, we ventured out yesterday, suitable face-covered and social distanced. It was a warm, humid August day with a high-pressure system dominating the UK weather. There had been over-night rain. Almost everywhere we looked we could see winged black ants climbing to the tops of grass and taking flight - some large, some small, or fat, wingless females crawling about on the footpaths, in the open-air carpark.

It was a local 'flying ant day'. The conditions of temperature, humidity and barometric pressure were exactly right, and this triggered a nuptial or dispersal flight in the local area.

But why is this nuptial flight performed?

The nuptial flight of the Black Ant.

The nuptial flight, also known as the "nuptial dispersal" or "swarming," is a crucial phase in the reproductive cycle of many ant species, including the common garden black ant (Lasius niger). During this event, winged male and female ants, known as alates, leave their nest in large numbers to mate and establish new colonies. Here's an overview of the nuptial flight of the common garden black ant:

1. Timing and Conditions:
   Nuptial flights typically occur during warm and humid conditions, often after a rainfall, which helps prevent the ants' delicate wings from drying out. These flights are usually synchronized across a particular area or colony, ensuring that multiple ants from different nests can gather in one place for optimal mating opportunities.
2. Preparations:
   Prior to the nuptial flight, ant colonies prepare for the event. The queen ant and worker ants might care for the alates, feeding and grooming them to ensure they are in good condition for the flight.
3. Emergence of Alates:
   During the nuptial flight, the alates emerge from the nest and take to the air. These alates are reproductive individuals, with the females destined to become new queen ants, and the males being potential mates.
4. Mating:
   Once in the air, male and female alates from different colonies come together to mate. The males die shortly after mating, while the fertilized females shed their wings and search for suitable locations to start new colonies.
5. Founding New Colonies:
   The fertilized females, now referred to as "dealate queens," search for suitable nesting sites. They dig into the ground or find crevices in wood or rocks to establish their new colonies. The queen will lay her first batch of eggs, which develop into worker ants. These workers take over the tasks of foraging, caring for the queen, and expanding the colony.
6. Colony Development:
   As the colony grows, the queen continues to lay eggs, producing both worker ants and new alates for the next nuptial flight. Over time, the colony can grow to contain thousands of ants and become a complex and organized society.

The nuptial flight is a crucial event for the survival and dispersal of ant species, as it allows for the establishment of new colonies and the genetic diversity essential for the species' long-term success. It also serves as a means of preventing inbreeding and exchanging genetic material between different ant nests.

Biologically, it makes sense that evolution has produced female ants with a strategy for ensuring the strongest male is the one she mates with and that local climate is the trigger because this ensures there is a supply of competing males from other colonies in the area, so increase genetic diversity and reduce the probability of inbreeding. This is exactly the sort of mating strategy that the Theory of Evolution predicts, and similar strategies are seen throughout nature - the equivalent of the race to be the first to the egg that sees millions of sperms released, all so one can be successful, sometimes.

But, just like the latter, the black ant nuptial flight makes no sense at all as the design of an omnipotent, omniscient intelligence, or even a designer without all the omnis with which creationists like to endow their putative creator. There would be no reason to build in genetic variation, for example, so no reason to have a fitness filter.

In reality, the nuptial flight of the black ant epitomises several of the distinguishing features of evolution by an unintelligent, utilitarian natural process which would be absent it the process had black ants been intelligently designed:

1. Prolific waste:
   A huge surplus of males is raised in each colony but most of them will fail to mate and will die shortly after. This wastes resources and means additional worker ants are needed to tend to the non-productive, and ultimately unneeded, males. And why is the race strategy needed in the first place? Because there is inbuilt variation between the males, so it matters which one wins the race. An intelligent designer would not have designed variation that needs to be filtered through competition in the first place.
2. Needless complexity:
   Often cited by creationists as evidence of design, complexity is actually evidence of bad design since good, optimal design is minimally complex and therefore more efficient to use and produce. Here we have the massive complexity of a large number of ultimately redundant, use-once-and-throw-away, males and all the attendant cost of raising them, ultimately because we have the massive complexity of variation in the gene pool, whereas an intelligent designer would have designed an optimal gene pool that didn't requires a fitness selection phase anywhere in the life cycle.
3. No clear ultimate purpose:
   As with all species, the only ultimate purpose appears to be to make copies of black ants. Unlike a manufactures tool, or any object designed by other tool-making species, there is a clear and obvious purpose. The purpose will have determined the design and a well-designed tool should be tailored for that specific purpose. There is no such obvious design purpose with black ants, or any other species for that matter, other than reproduction for the sake of reproduction.

Biologically, as a survival strategy, reproduction is a form of entropy management, and once you have replication and variation, evolution becomes inevitable and results in such manifestly poor designs as these prolifically wasteful, needlessly complex and ultimately purposeless mating strategies we see acted out in the right weather conditions every summer - something any intelligent designer worthy of the name could have avoided with ease.

Variation in design, which would not be there if intelligently designed by an omniscient, omnipotent designer, is both the underlying cause of evolution and also make it biologically necessary to ensure the tendency is always towards retaining the beneficial mutations and to prevent the drift to genetic deterioration that would result from random mutation with no fitness filters.

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Thank you for sharing!

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