Most male ants in most ant species are not diploid. Yellow crazy ants are an invasive species wreaking havoc in Southeast Asia and Oceania and their diploid males are apparently part of why. It allows a single queen ant to start a new colony.
The flexiblity afforded by chimaerism in this system reminds me a bit of the dikaryotic condition in many species of mushrooms (higher basidiomycete fungi). In this case the parental nuclei also do not fuse on fertilization (plasmogamy), but are maintained separately as a stable arrangement at a subcellular level. So you don't get individual cells having either one parental genome or the other, every cell is binucleate, having two parental genomes in two separate nuclei.
Imagine if every other cell in your body was a transplant from someone else.
And the additional remarkable item, is that this is not just a random fluke that can happen to an individual, and not even merely normal for this species, but appears to actually be an integral neccessary part of the species life cycle. IE they use it and they wouldn't live without it.
A. Human women become chimeras when they carry a fetus.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8155153
B. It's the reason for the headline -- their weird chimeric males -- but it seems more important to me that it facilitates invasive behavior by allowing a single ant to start a new colony.
YMMV, of course, and probably will.
And worth noting that if all goes well, you'd never know you were chimeric.
- The simplest and most obvious way to do this is to be a clonal organism.
- But you can go more complicated than that. You can have a female parthenogenetically give birth to males and then mate with those males. Aphids do this. (Actually, some cursory research suggests that aphids are more likely to give parthenogenetic birth to a batch of sons and daughters who then mate with each other?)