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Ants that seem to defy biology – They lay eggs that hatch into another species
- gowld 1y agoEvery egg-born species was hatched from a different species, at some point in the past. The egg came before the chicken.
- mcc1ane 1y agoPreviously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285780
- corygarms 1y agoThis 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.
- sidewndr46 1y agoYeah, 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/ 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 1y agoNote 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.
- Razengan 1y agoImagine this on a alien planetary civilization scale.. and the real Zerg and Tyranids and Xenomorphs that must be out there...
- alphazard 1y agoIf 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.
- IAmBroom 1y agoAssuming no extinction, climate change, nor heat death of the universe. Evolution is not a particularly fast optimizer, on the scale of human perception.
- heavyset_go 1y agoEvolution as we know it works on Earth because it is a relatively protected and stable environment, giving genes the time they need to explore a space and adapt to the relatively slow and small changes on Earth.
- NonHyloMorph 1y agoImho genes are not what if at all should be attributed aggncy here (that might, if at all, be the decentralised sympoietic process of ecosystems) Just wanted to add this, i see where the formulation is useful as a figure of speech.
- graemep 1y agoClimate change? Climate change produces a changed environment. It actually drives more evolution to adapt to that changed environment. Even very sudden changes such as some that caused mass extinctions, it just changed the direction of evolution. The only species that stopped evolving were those that went extinct. No more dinosaurs (bar birds) but lots more mammals.
- ajkjk 1y agobrute force search can still be limited in the states it can reach. If there's some limitation on the types of moves you can make, which presumably there is, then you're limited to states that have paths between them.
- rsynnott 1y agoIt may not be as weird as all that (of course, it’s still spectacularly weird) because fertile male ants are haploid!
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoI'm no expert, but why does the female need to remove her own genetic material from her eggs to produce clones? Isn't it possible that during the DNA recombination phase the male DNA somehow dominates? This ability of the female to give birth to "multiple species" seems to me best understood as the two "species" not having yet actually become distinct, since the only meaningful definition of speciation is when two sub-populations of a species have genetically drifted so far apart that they can no longer successfully interbreed and produce fertile young. During the process of speciation (one species splitting into two) there are going to be various messy half-way stages such as lions and tigers still able to interbreed and so not fully speciated (even if well along, and not going to typically interbreed), horses and donkeys still able to interbreed but producing infertile young (mules), and these ants in this strange state where interbreeding apparently only results in males. It would be cool to be able to speed up the evolutionary timescale to see the process happen, but what we have here is like a still frame from a movie.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago> M. ibericus and M. structor are not closely related, evolutionarily speaking. The two species diverged more than five million years ago, according to the paper.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoTime means nothing - species can stay stable for very long periods of time (e.g. coleocanth), and more to the point it makes no sense to call two animals different species if they can still successfully interbreed, since there then still remains the possibility that they could recombine. NOT being able to interbreed successfully (donkey & horse) marks the point of no return where they are now bound to genetically drift further apart over time.
- IAmBroom 1y agoRegarding coleocanths... we have no data on how much drift has happened in their DNA. Our only real data is that they are morphologically very similar to their ancestors over a long range. Your last sentence correctly points out the frailty of our definition of "species". However, this is not the only time our data has confounded our artificial, if often useful, definition of species boundaries.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoAnts seem to be nature's favorite way to experiment
- mahirsaid 1y agoI read about this a some other source. I was so confused and lost.
- sjducb 1y agoThe original paper discusses this in more detail. There is a well understood phenomenon called sperm paratism where male sperm will take over the egg, instead of sexually reproducing with the egg. In sexual reproduction the offspring has 50% of its genetic material from both parents. In sperm parasitism the offspring is 100% related to the male and the female’s genetic material has been destroyed. These inbericus females are allowing the messor male line to reproduce by sperm parisitism to maintain a domesticated messor line that they can then later sexually reproduce with to create hybrid worker ants. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09425-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09425-w
- Torkel 1y agoSo the messor male line is without sexual reproduction. Essentially a clone army, all with identical genes? I find it interesting that this has not led to all the clones knocked out by diseases, as happens to eg our banana plantations.
- Amezarak 1y agoAll M. structor's aren't clones, only in that colony. They are out their in the wild reproducing with other M. structors sexually.
- synapsomorphy 1y agoThis 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.
- suriya-ganesh 1y agoThis 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 1y ago> 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 1y agoIndeed. 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.
- afavour 1y agoI think you can argue it either way. Either one is trying to map human concepts onto non-human existence and that's an inherently muddy process. What does "individual" really mean, anyway...
- suriya-ganesh 1y agoMaybe. The workers are involuntary but willing participants, in a grand scheme where the queens and males get to create new generations. But this is possible only if we anthropomorphise a lot. because at the level of ants/bees I'm not even sure what "individual" even means. But genetically they originate from the same individual, live for the betterment of the whole, and have very minor say in what happens to themselves or their genes. Much similar to cells in a human being does.
- danielinoa 1y agoSo the egg does indeed come first before the proverbial chicken.
- IAmBroom 1y agoWe've known that since Darwin.
- titanomachy 1y agoFantastic 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.
- yorwba 1y agoIf ibericus/structor hybrid females become sterile workers, but pure ibericus females become queens, that increases the share of ibericus genes in the next generation. So as soon as a mutation arose that had this effect, it outcompeted all other lineages, but also made ibericus dependant on hybridization with structor males to produce workers for the colony. The adaptation that is the focus of the article works around this drawback by letting ibericus colonies produce their own supply of structor males. So there are roughly three evolutionary phases: 1. Hybridization is common, but largely inconsequential. 2. Hybrid queen elimination. 3. Male cloning.
- ogig 1y agoAnts, 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 1y agoWasps evolved from ants didn't they? edit: i might have that backwards
- IAmBroom 1y ago"Wasps" is non-phylogenetic. The LUCA of Hymenoptera was probably a wasp-like animal; there are several extant lines called "wasps" that diverged early; bees (Apoidea) and ants (Formicidae), however, diverged late from "wasps".
- MathMonkeyMan 1y agoAnts are descended from a wasp-like ancestor.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- insane_dreamer 1y agoCRISPR, Ant Edition.
- daemonk 1y agoSo the queen can lay 3 types: hybrid female, Ibiricus male, structor male. Did they do karyotyping? Is it actually that the queen somehow removed its own genetic material from the nuclei or does it somehow get silenced when the M. structor genetic material is present in the nuclei (which is interesting by itself). Perhaps some kind of complex imprinting is happening.
- nextworddev 1y agoReal life Zerg Queen..
- Khoth 1y agoFour types! You missed Ibiricus female, ie the next generation of queen
- cs702 1y agoThankfully the other species is not human beings, as in the Alien movies! More seriously, what those ants are doing is kind of unbelievable.
- jacinda 1y agoOn the one hand, this seems nuts. On the other hand, the mechanism compared to all the other things biology can and has done doesn't seem that crazy. Create egg, remove nucleus of egg, replace nucleus of egg with one or two nuclei from stored sperm that initiate replication and growth of the other species from there (depending on the exact mechanism which it sounds like they're still figuring out). Compared with fungus that creates zombie ants (this is a real thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis) and birds that change their eggs to match those of other species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasitism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasitism) it almost seems tame.
- LarsDu88 1y agoThis seems on the surface to violate Hamilton's Law (rB > C) The hybrid worker ants should still share 75% of their DNA with the queen and therefore it makes sense for them to cooperate regardless of the source of DNA for their father. The M. structor male clones however do not share any DNA with the queen presumably. I wouldn't be surprised if further studies found that the M. structor genes were behaving selfishly. They must have some sort of aggressive mechanism for hijacking and evicting the queen genes for making clones. Alternatively there could be a parasitic organism propagating through the reproductive procress.
- bsza 1y agoAll the workers are hybrid. Queen gets to have workers, which she otherwise couldn’t produce. M. structor males get to pass on 100% of their genes. There is no altruism involved.
- brap 1y agoI just don’t want understand, for what purpose?
- mugivarra69 1y ago[dead]
- fainpul 1y agoThere's an excellent series of lectures from Stanford's Robert Sapolsky [1] about Human Behavioral Biology. While not about ants or insects, he brings up various examples from different species to explain the crazy "optimization war" of evolution. It's mind-expanding to learn about the many mechanisms at work - much more than just what can be encoded and passed on with genes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D
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- notorandit 1y agoThere are more things under these skies that a fervid imagination can produce.
- ssener2001 1y ago[dead]
- bhickey 1y agoI find it fascinating that this paper cites the work of William Morton Wheeler, a myrmecologist who was last alive nearly 90 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morton_Wheeler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morton_Wheeler
- jibal 1y agoBiology is not "defied", whatever that could possibly mean, and there's no need to rethink the concept of species--there's a sizable literature laying out how this is a fuzzy vague concept that humans use to categorize things but that it doesn't "carve nature at its joints"--nature doesn't have joints.
- gitaarik 1y agoBiology as defined by humans. This is the third paragraph of the article: > “The classic concept says that [a species] is a group of organisms with similar physical and genetic characteristics that can reproduce with each other in nature and produce fertile offspring,” says Xim Cerdá, an ecologist at Doñana Biological Station in Spain who was not involved with the research, to Miguel Ángel Criado at El País. “But it turns out that’s not the case; two species are needed here. We’re going to have to rethink the concept.” The article doesn't talk about something like "carve nature at its joints"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- charlangas 1y agoReminds me of the Ambystoma salamanders that reproduce via kleptogenesis. They are all female, and they "steal" sperm from males of 3 or 4 related species. Most of the time they discard the male's genetic material, but sometimes they incorporate it, which results in embryos that have multiple sets of chromosomes. It's wild. The offspring can contain genetic material from up to 4 different parental species.
- mahirsaid 1y agoInsects are so interesting. Their existence is so bizarre and fundamental to nature, otherwise there would not be no nature.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoAnother article on the same subject was posted under here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45285780
- Lightkey 1y agoThose are chimera ants. Quick, someone call the Hunter Association before the king hatches!
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoThis sounds like an Alien movie.
- MagicMoonlight 1y agoBecause this method of reproduction is based on cloning, it doesn't really matter how far they diverge. So they probably started doing this when they were the same species, but they've now evolved to be different. And it doesn't matter, because they can still be cloned even if they are completely different to the queens.
- Amezarak 1y ago> The classic concept says that [a species] is a group of organisms with similar physical and genetic characteristics that can reproduce with each other in nature and produce fertile offspring,” The fact this is a gross simplification that doesn't reflect reality at all is already discussed at length in the Origin of Species. "Species" is a human abstraction with no real biological reality. Almost "species" can breed and create fertile offspring with other "species". Of course as genetic distance increases the chances are increasingly unlikely, but there are some real wild cards out there.
- cramcgrab 1y agoNope. Biology wrong.
- tremon 1y ago> the researchers had to come up with a new term to describe the behavior exhibited by M. ibericus queens: “xenoparity,” which essentially means “foreign birth.” Ouch, that hurt the classicist part of my brain. Why did they choose a greek-latin hybrid word, when the rest of the field of biology uses the greek -genesis to mean birth?
- messor_ibericus 1y ago1) There are many greek-latin hybrid words in biology (hepatocyte, neurotransmitter, gastrointestinal...). 2) Xenogenesis is a word that already existed before the publication of the article and using the same world could have been confusing: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17901077/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17901077/. 3) Given than we're talking about a species that lay another species in order to create hybrids, using a word that is ethymologically hybrid sounds like a perfect fit.
- thephotonsphere 1y agoThis is no surprise. Have you people not seen the movie Phase IV (1974)?