Ants Seem to Defy Biology: They Lay Eggs That Hatch into Another Species
18 comments
·September 19, 2025corygarms
alphazard
If you take the idea of genes as the target of evolution seriously, then every possible "bargain" between different genes that moves towards a pareto optimal for those genes, will eventually be discovered through the brute force search.
sidewndr46
Yeah, I came here to say the same thing. I'm really confused how the female can produce a clone of the male of another species. Wouldn't the other males sperm contain only half the genetic material needed to reproduce? But apparently ant DNA doesn't work that way for sex:
https://press.uni-mainz.de/determining-sex-in-ants/
somehow a male ant has one set of chromosomes while the female ant has two sets of chromosomes. So a male ant sperm must contain enough information to make a complete male? Then when they mate with the female of the other species, the females egg actually gets blanked out so to speak, containing none of the females own genetic material. Then the male sperm fertilizes the egg with one set of chromosomes producing a male offspring that is a clone?
tsimionescu
Note that many, many animals have non-genetic sex determination. Most fish, amphibians, and reptiles have the same genes for both males and females. Sexual differentiation typically depends on things like the egg temperature or salinity and so on. Some species can even change sex during their adult lifetimes, with external conditions triggering a complex hormonal shift that convert an adult, fertile male into an adult, fertile female.
Having genetic differences between males and females is mostly a bird and mammal thing, at least among vertebrates.
soperj
Man, the bible missed all of this when they were talking about the two animals of every species on the Ark. What else did they leave out?
Razengan
Imagine this on a alien planetary civilization scale.. and the real Zerg and Tyranids and Xenomorphs that must be out there...
ogig
Ants, and wasps too, have an incredible variety of amazing resources. Some species will have more than one queen, other will cultivate fungus or sheep aphids, others make nests the size of a nut and others the size of the ecuator, some are parasitic of an specific specie. There are sun reflecting desert ants, amazonian river floating ants, container ants full of sweet for the colony, mechanical ants with cyborg-like mandibules with absurd power ratios, you have bridge building ants that use their own body. Their genetic tricks are amazing and diverse too.
It's better than sci-fi, if you like strange creatures, dive into myrmecology.
soperj
Wasps evolved from ants didn't they?
edit: i might have that backwards
suriya-ganesh
This is wild. But eusocial insect have a lot of bizarre eccentricities in sex determinism. less than 1% of the colony can actually reproduce, every other being is there for the betterment of the 1%. The workers will mutilate, sacrifice and kill themselves just for the queen to have 0.1% better survivability.
It is helpful to think of the whole colony as a singular organism as opposed to individuals, because our understanding of individual starts breaking down at these levels
hearsathought
> It is helpful to think of the whole colony as a singular organism as opposed to individuals, because our understanding of individual starts breaking down at these levels
Can't the organisms be viewed as individuals with a shared common goal.
lo_zamoyski
Indeed. They are individual organisms, not one large organism. Talk of "superorganisms" seems to presuppose that each individual must seek his own survival and reproduction, but that's untrue. From the point of view of the species and its propagation and survival, it is not a question of individuals. That's just one strategy that may characterize the reproductive behavior of some species, but not others.
titanomachy
Fantastic science, very cool discovery. I'm surprised to learn that ant colonies don't really produce males in lab conditions, that must make this research incredibly difficult.
> For M. ibericus, this adaptation ensures they have plenty of workers, which are responsible for many important tasks in a colony
I don't understand this part, though. It doesn't address why it is beneficial for the workers to be hybrids instead of pure M. ibericus. At some point M. ibericus lost the ability to make non-hybrid workers, but that must have happened after.
insane_dreamer
CRISPR, Ant Edition.
danielinoa
So the egg does indeed come first before the proverbial chicken.
synapsomorphy
This is a really interesting discovery. In ants it's apparently common for one species to stop being able to produce workers on their own, and use the sperm from another species instead.
In this case, that happened. But if you do that, you can only expand as far as the other species expands. So you can expand further if you can find a way to keep the males of that species around with you.
This species does that by having a reproductive pathway that, if a queen is fertilized by that 'domesticated' species, the DNA of the 'host' species is removed from the eggs. So you get an ant that has none of the host's DNA. Except they do inherit the mitochondrial DNA (it always comes from the mother). The 'domesticated' males and the 'wild-type' males do look slightly different - it's not clear if this is because of the mitochondrial DNA or because they're raised differently or what.
I read someone compare the domesticated species to a 'superorganism organelle' - just like an archaea cell sucked up a bacteria to become a eukaryote, the host species sucked up the domesticated species to become some combination of both.
Wild to think what other crazy ways of living and makin babies must be out there that we haven't figured out yet.
null
This is nuts. If I'm understanding correctly, the M. ibiricus queen mates with a M. structor male, uses his sperm to create sterile, hybrid female worker ants for her colony, then she (astonishingly) can also lay eggs that develop into fertile M. structor males, which means she has removed her genetic material from the egg and effectively cloned the male she previously mated with.