did you see the article about harvester ant queens cloning male builder ants? its so cool!
Yes, I actually just read it yesterday, after hearing about it on Science Friday!
This is crazy, and as far as I know, no one has ever found anything like this before!
Ant queen lays eggs that hatch into two species
Bizarre discovery of interspecies cloning “almost impossible to believe,” biologists say
Reproduction is strange in many social insects, but the Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) takes the weirdness to the next level. Queens mate with males of another species and then clone them, researchers report today in Nature, which means this ant is the only known organism that propagates two species by itself. Evolutionary biologist Jonathan Romiguier of the University of Montpellier, who led the team, calls M. ibericus “in a sense, the most complex, colonial life form we know of so far.” The finding “is almost impossible to believe and pushes our understanding of evolutionary biology,” says Michael Goodisman, an evolutionary biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved with the new research. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all, social insects reveal another surprise.”
Read more: Ant queen lays eggs that hatch into two species
Iberian Harvester Ants, Messor ibericus, can produce offspring of two different species, according to a new Nature study. Messor ibericus queens can produce males of Messor structor in addition to their own species. This bizarre observation is at odds with how scientists conventionally think about species, so it may prompt a rethink of these already blurry definitions.
Read the paper: One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants | Nature
