Yeah I was surprised too! I don't actually know that much about ants or biology, but
- (1) ants fly!
well they don't usually fly, but they spread wings and fly during a "nuptual flight" to start new colonies [0]. I only learned this a few years ago when I moved into the woods and mass migrations of flying ants often.
From what I can see, all wasps fly, and I can't find anything saying their common ancestor couldn't fly. So since ants can partially fly, I think it's much more likely they evolved from a flying ancestor. They just lost lost the ability to fly most of the time and totally dominated the land niche.
Incidentally, living in the woods has also taught me that there are a variety of wasps that live underground like ants do. I used to think they all built open-air hives.
- (2) I made that comment mostly based on a paper [1] I found while googling around. According to the paper:
> The stinging wasps (Hymenoptera: Aculeata) are an extremely diverse lineage of hymenopteran insects, encompassing over 70,000 described species.... The most well-studied lineages of Aculeata are the ants... and the bees
This is consistent with what I've seen on Wikipedia. Basically ants, bees, and wasps are very closely related. The Wikipedia page on Aculeata [2] has a nice family tree that includes sawflies, bees, and wasps.
So yes, wasps is wide like beetles. But there are more beetles. Beetles get their own order, whereas stinging wasps, bees, and ants have an "infraorder", which I guess is like an order but smaller. The Wikipedia article on Hymenoptera has a family tree that shows the relationship with beetles [3].
- (1) ants fly!
well they don't usually fly, but they spread wings and fly during a "nuptual flight" to start new colonies [0]. I only learned this a few years ago when I moved into the woods and mass migrations of flying ants often.
From what I can see, all wasps fly, and I can't find anything saying their common ancestor couldn't fly. So since ants can partially fly, I think it's much more likely they evolved from a flying ancestor. They just lost lost the ability to fly most of the time and totally dominated the land niche.
Incidentally, living in the woods has also taught me that there are a variety of wasps that live underground like ants do. I used to think they all built open-air hives.
- (2) I made that comment mostly based on a paper [1] I found while googling around. According to the paper:
> The stinging wasps (Hymenoptera: Aculeata) are an extremely diverse lineage of hymenopteran insects, encompassing over 70,000 described species.... The most well-studied lineages of Aculeata are the ants... and the bees
This is consistent with what I've seen on Wikipedia. Basically ants, bees, and wasps are very closely related. The Wikipedia page on Aculeata [2] has a nice family tree that includes sawflies, bees, and wasps.
So yes, wasps is wide like beetles. But there are more beetles. Beetles get their own order, whereas stinging wasps, bees, and ants have an "infraorder", which I guess is like an order but smaller. The Wikipedia article on Hymenoptera has a family tree that shows the relationship with beetles [3].
[0] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/when-why-winged-ants-swarm-nu...
[1] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aculeata
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera