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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 c

• tsimionescu 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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?
    • NewJazz 1y ago
      Leviticus rightfully instructs you not to eat bats, but it seems to mistake them for special birds rather than mammals.
      • nyeah 1y ago
        There can't be much meat on a bat anyway.
        • soperj 1y ago
          there's not much on a snail either, but they're still delicious.
          • nyeah 1y ago
            They're fine. Mostly the butter stuff tastes good. I wouldn't put snail up there with badger or owl.
      • rsynnott 1y ago
        Wait, is there a _specific_ prohibition? Like, they fail Old Testament dietary rules miserably _anyway_.
        • NewJazz 1y ago
          These 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 ago
            Aaah, 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.)
    • tsimionescu 1y ago
      To be fair, you almost always still need two individuals to get reproduction going - you just don't need to be as picky about which two individuals as you might think. There are a rare few animals that can sometimes self-reproduce, but it's not a common strategy in the animal kingdom, even among hermaphroditic animals.
      • dekhn 1y ago
        Parthenogenesis is not uncommon in animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_taxa_that_use_parthenogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_taxa_that_use_partheno... (I am mostly quibbling with "rare few animals" but I can't really say much about the relative prevalence of parthenogenesis compared to sexual reproduction.
      • duskwuff 1y ago
        They're less rare than you might think. Parthenogenesis ("virgin birth") occasionally occurs in some domestic birds, including chickens and turkeys. Due to the way sex determination works in birds, the offspring created this way are always male. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579119370518 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003257911...
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
        • rsynnott 1y ago
          There are also a number of species of lizards, and one snake, which reproduce exclusively via parthenogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_squamates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_squamates In some though not all such species, there are no known male examples _at all_ (though in reptiles some forms of parthenogenesis can produce males).
        • dexterdog 1y ago
          Thank you so much for introducing me to this concept. I knew the word thanks to Shriekback. I used to have ducks. At one point when I only had 3 females, I found a broken egg with a fetus in it. I knew they were all female, but couldn't convince anybody of what I saw.
    • bethekidyouwant 1y ago
      They were actually intelligently designed this way any animal you can’t sex easily as a hermaphrodite
      • IAmBroom 1y ago
        Here's some punctuation: ....,,,;;;:::!!!??? I don't have the space to help on your other issues.
        • collingreen 1y ago
          That's ok, the space key seems to work just fine :troll:
    • rsynnott 1y ago
      This always struck me as a bit odd, because it was a somewhat common belief around then, and for long after, that many animals reproduced by abiogenesis anyway. Why bother taking two mice on the ark; everyone knows that mice spontaneously emerge from river mud! (It’s possible that this was just a Greek quirk and never made it to Palestine, I suppose.)
      • IAmBroom 1y ago
        The idea persisted into the Middle Ages. Can't say for certain that it was continuous, however; the medieval supporters quoted Aristotle et al.
      • philistine 1y ago
        Listen, we still don't know how eels reproduce. Our knowledge has never been all inclusive and properly disseminated. The fearful cave-dwelling scribes who wrote the old testament were clearly not up to date on their biology.
        • dormento 1y ago
          I didn't know either, but hn came to the rescue. In case you're one of today's lucky 10000: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-come-from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-...
          • jdiff 1y ago
            I think eels are safely outside the domain of knowledge where anyone could safely say "everybody knows that!"
            • zrezzed 1y ago
              https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
        • rsynnott 1y ago
          Well, no, I’m actually surprised that whoever wrote the Old Testament _was_ up enough on their biology (or at least aligned with biology, however accidentally) to realise that most animals reproduce sexually. This certainly wasn’t the conventional view in the Greek world, say, nor was it in the West until the 18th century or so.
    • sampo 1y ago
      > What else did they leave out? Plants. Fungi.
      • IAmBroom 1y ago
        The latter they brought with an especially rank pot of Grandma Noah's sauerkraut.
    • sidewndr46 1y ago
      It was an early deployment of RAID1. Two copies of everything
  • 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 ago
      Important 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 ago
    What 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 ago
      M. 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 ago
    Yup; 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.