Do fire ants have inhered traits?

Answer 1

Every living, breeding creature has inherited traits, whether that creature is a virus, a Redwood, or a whale. You won't find a redwood tree making seeds from which ants or cows or people or or even grass or oaks will grow; their seeds contain nucleic acids (mostly DNA) that pass on the traits that make them redwoods, and only redwoods. The traits of every part of the plant, meaning the way all of them work, its juices, its wood, its skins, its roots, the shapes of its cells, all those traits depend on the codes in its DNA that its parents gave it. The traits are the way those parts work, and all those ways come its parents; we say that it inherited the traits from the parents. If it had not inherited traits it simply would not have been a redwood at all.

In the same way any ant, and certainly any fire ant, comes from a single egg cell. That egg cell contains the DNA in which the information is stored that the baby ant inherits, meaning that it gets that information for all its traits from its parent or parents. That information controls the way its body builds as it grows, forming the rest of its cells, and fixing the way they fit together and work together to make an ant and give it the habits of an ant.

Without that information, that building plan, nothing about the young fire ant would even have been a fire ant at all. A fire ant doesn't just happen, it needs the traits written into the DNA and other parts that the parents passed on, just as a car doesn't happen; it needs the steel and plastic and the parts and the plans that the factory uses to make it. Otherwise it might as well have been a rock or a junk pile.