September 7, 2025
3 min learn
These Ants Are Totally different Species however Share a Mom
Ant queens of 1 species are sexual parasites that clone ants of one other species to create hybrid staff that do their bidding
Queen Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) may give delivery to ants of their very own species (left) and, utilizing a cloning trick, offspring of a unique one (Messor structor, proper).
Jonathan Romiguier, Yannick Juvé, Laurent Soldati
A standard kind of ant in Europe breaks a elementary rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring which are an entire totally different species. These queen Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) are sexual parasites that depend on the sperm of males of the ant species Messor structor. They use this sperm to breed a military of sturdy employee ants, that are hybrids of the 2 species.
Knowledge now present that, within the absence of close by M. structor colonies, M. ibericus queens can clone male M. structor ants by laying eggs that comprise solely M. structor DNA of their nuclei. The findings had been revealed in Nature on 3 September.
“It’s a completely unbelievable, weird story of a system that enables issues to occur that appear virtually unimaginable,” says Jacobus Boomsma, an evolutionary biologist on the College of Copenhagen.
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DIY cloning
Iberian harvester ants co-exist with M. structor in some elements of Europe, which has traditionally given M. ibericus queens an ample provide of M. structor males to mate with.
However evolutionary biologist Jonathan Romiguier on the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier in France and his colleagues seen one thing unusual on the Italian island of Sicily: they discovered Iberian harvester ants all over the place however not a single colony of M. structor.
When the researchers peered inside colonies of the Iberian harvester ant, they discovered two varieties of ant that seemed very totally different. Genetic analyses confirmed that the colonies contained each M. ibericus and M. structor, regardless of the dearth of M. structor populations on the island.
Additional analyses solved the thriller: Iberian harvester queens clone M. structor ants to keep up a provide of their sperm. They then mate with these M. structor ants to provide hybrid staff that care for the colony, together with by constructing the nest and foraging for meals. In impact, M. ibericus has domesticated M. structor and its genome, Romiguier says.
The 2 species diverged greater than 5 million years in the past, so it’s wild to see one species producing the opposite, Romiguier provides. “That’s virtually how way back people and chimpanzees diverged.”
Intriguingly, when the researchers put the M. structor ants cloned by the Iberian harvester ants into an everyday M. structor colony, the bugs had been killed for being international invaders, regardless of trying practically similar to these within the colony. That’s as a result of the cloned ants carried the pheromones of their Iberian cousins, in order that they had been handled as enemies, Romiguier says. One other means that they’re totally different from the ants within the M. structor colony is that, though the clones have solely M. structor DNA within the nuclei of their cells, they carry M. ibericus DNA of their mitochondria — the cells’ energy-producing items.
A profitable partnership?
Romiguier says that this domestication of the M. structor genome resembles the useful partnership that led to mitochondria turning into a part of the eukaryotic cell a couple of billion years in the past after a primitive host cell engulfed a bacterium. At the moment, eukaryotes — which embrace all animals, vegetation and fungi — even have two distinct genomes of their cells: one within the nucleus and one within the mitochondria. However Boomsma doesn’t anticipate M. ibericus’s uncommon sexual parasitism to be practically as evolutionarily profitable as eukaryotes’ acquisition of mitochondria and unfold to different organisms.
“Ants are simply superb and power us to be open-minded to permit the invention of unorthodox mating programs,” says Claudie Doums, an evolutionary ecologist on the Sensible Faculty of Superior Research in Paris.
This text is reproduced with permission and was first revealed on September 3, 2025.
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