An Exhibition at The Field Museum, Chicago

An evolution question

Do all ant species have the same number of chromosomes? How do scientist think species evolved with different numbers of chromosomes?

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Permalink Reply by Corrie Moreau on August 19, 2011 at 1:50pm

Hello Don,

Interesting question! For most ant species (there are over 12,500 ant species) we do not know how many chromosomes they have. This is true for most living organisms.

For the ~750 ant species that have had their chromosomes counted the number varies greatly. For perspective, humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while ants can have 1 to 60 pairs of chromosomes. In fact the ant Myrmecia croslandi has the least number of any known organism with only a single pair of chromosomes (one pair in the females since they are diploid, while the males have only a single chromosome since they are haploid).

If you want to read more, Lorite & Palomeque (2010) recently wrote a review article on this topic that you can find here.