[corygarms]

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.

[sjducb]

The 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

[Torkel]

So 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.

[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.

[ajkjk]

brute 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.

[IAmBroom]

Assuming no extinction, climate change, nor heat death of the universe.

Evolution is not a particularly fast optimizer, on the scale of human perception.

[tsunamifury]

This assumes multiple infinite axis which certainly don’t exist and is therefore false.

Any early branch can infinitely on that confined branch. It means the billions of other possible branches may never be explored even given infinite time.

Counter would be the evolutionary fill theory where any branch can become any other branch given an environment.

[cgio]

That’s interesting! What other crazy types of bargains have we seen before or could someone imagine?

[jcims]

I still struggle with the brute force search a bit. Just naively a very small gene has 4^500 possible combinations.

[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?

[sampo]

> 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

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.

[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.

[jcul]

> 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?

[ants_everywhere]

Ants seem to be nature's favorite way to experiment

[IAmBroom]

The Bacteria Kingdom coughs and smiles knowingly at the Archaean supercluster.

[rsynnott]

It may not be as weird as all that (of course, it’s still spectacularly weird) because fertile male ants are haploid!

[mahirsaid]

I read about this a some other source. I was so confused and lost.

[Razengan]

Imagine this on a alien planetary civilization scale.. and the real Zerg and Tyranids and Xenomorphs that must be out there...

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I'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.

[famouswaffles]

Ants, bees, and wasps operate on a genetic system called haplodiploidy. It works like this.

Queens don't actually mate to produce male offspring.

Females are Diploid: They are created from a fertilized egg. They have two sets of chromosomes - one set from the mother (the queen) and one from the father's sperm, which the queen releases from the spermatheca when she wants a female.

Males are Haploid: They are created from an unfertilized egg. They have only one set of chromosomes from the queen located in the nucleas of the egg. The queen does not release the male's sperm when she wants a male offspring. They have no father. They hatch from an egg that contains only the mother's genetic material, meaning they are essentially a haploid (single chromosome set) version of the queen.

The M. ibiricus queen produces 2 kinds of offspring with the M. structor:

Sterile Female Hybrid Workers: These are produced in the standard way. The queen lays an egg (containing her genes) and fertilizes it with the sperm from the M. structor male. The resulting worker has DNA from both parents. It's a true hybrid. There is no "dominance"; it's a merger of two different species' DNA.

Fertile Male M.structor Clones: This is where things get really bizzare.

Remember that in the normal case:

- The queen does not use a male's sperm to produce male offspring.

- Joining both DNA always results in a female (males do not have two sets of chromosomes)

There can only be one conclusion. The queen creates this special clone from the male's DNA only, probably by somehow purging her DNA from the nucleus of her egg.

[wizzwizz4]

> 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.