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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 f
by corygarms 1y ago
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.
- 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.
- soperj 1y agoMan, 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?
- NewJazz 1y agoLeviticus rightfully instructs you not to eat bats, but it seems to mistake them for special birds rather than mammals.
- nyeah 1y agoThere can't be much meat on a bat anyway.
- rsynnott 1y agoWait, is there a _specific_ prohibition? Like, they fail Old Testament dietary rules miserably _anyway_.
- NewJazz 1y agoThese are the birds you are to regard as unclean and not eat because they are unclean: the eagle, the vulture, [a bunch of other birds] and the bat" https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2011:13-19&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2011:...
- rsynnott 1y agoAaah, right, I suppose if you’re assuming it’s a bird it _would_ need a specific call-out, yeah. I was assuming it’d be covered by the hooves-and-stomachs stuff, but if you don’t think it’s a mammal in the first place that wouldn’t work. (From the above: “Bible Gateway is currently unavailable to consumers in the United Kingdom and European Union due to technical issues.” I am now very curious just which EU regulation the bible website was worried about.)
- duskwuff 1y ago> Having genetic differences between males and females is mostly a bird and mammal thing, at least among vertebrates. Also: the configuration and function of sex chromosomes is not consistent even within mammals. There are a number of species - primarily rodents - with unusual sex-determining systems, like species with XX/X0 (i.e. where males have an unpaired X chromosome) or even X0/X0. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8617835/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8617835/
- tempestn 1y agoImportant plot element in Jurassic Park!
- sampo 1y ago> I'm really confused how the female can produce a clone of the male of another species. In normal ants, the queen can produce haploid (single set of chromosomes) unfertilized eggs that hatch into males. Normal ant males are haploid. They don't have a father, they can not have sons (but the do have a grandfather, and their daughters will make them grandsons). When the ant queen decides to produce sons, she will make haploid eggs via meiosis as normal, and just won't fertilize them with male sperm. Ants don't have sex chromosomes. An individual with a single set of chromosomes (haploid) is a male, an individual with double set of chromosomes (diploid) is a female. Ant males are almost like sperm cells that grew into multicellular organisms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy Now, a Messor ibericus queen can produce eggs with her own genetic material removed, and fertilize these with the single set of chromosomes from a Messor structor male. (It will still have the mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA from the queen.) And because the male only has a single set of chromosomes, the sperm and the resulting offspring has an identical single copy of the father's genetic material (except the mitochondria that came from the mother). So the son is a clone of the father (except for mitochondria). The queen can also mate with males of her own species, contributing half of her own chromosomes to combine with the full single set of the male chromosomes, to produce to-be-queen female offspring. Here we have the normal genetic recombination (though only on the mother's side) to keep the evolutionary benefits of the variation from sexual reproduction.
- subroutine 1y agoWhat are the odds this behavior is not completely hostile from the side of the builder ant? There seems to be some implication of symbiotic relationship, but maybe I'm reading too much into it. The interesting part is whether M. ibericus queens do actively remove their own genetic from eggs fertilized with builder sperm. Why would they do this?
- sampo 1y agoM. ibericus queens produce ibericus males and ibericus females, so that these can mate and produce more ibericus queens. This keeps the normal sexual reproduction of the species going on. M. ibericus queens produce ibericus×structor hybrids as infertile female worker ants. M. ibericus queens produce structor males, so future queens can keep producing the hybrid worker ants. My guess is, maybe there is some benefit having the workers to be hybrids and not pure ibericus ("hybrid vigor" [1]). So it's worth the effort of keeping the structor males along, to be able to produce the hybrid workers. But I think the pure ibericus genes in the line of queens are in control. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
- jcul 1y ago> It was very difficult, because in lab conditions, it’s nearly impossible to have males,” says co-author Jonathan Romiguier, an ecologist at the University of Montpellier in France, to New Scientist’s Tim Vernimmen. “We had something like 50 colonies and monitored them for two years without a single male being born. Then we got lucky. This confuses me too. Did the queen once mate with one of these males and save the sperm for two years? Or are the queens somehow born with a copy of the genetic material. Or does the old queen produce one, which mates with the new queen, and then dies off. And the new queen is able to hold onto that sperm for years (forever?). And they only produce a handful of males for this purpose? Also why is it so difficult to have males in lab conditions?
- rsynnott 1y agoYup; in most ants the queen has a bit of an orgy, once, and then saves the sperm for the rest of her life. Male ants (in most species) are really only useful for starting new nests.
- 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.