Queen ants from Southern Europe produce male clones of completely different species. It suggests that we need to tear through the playbook of reproductive biology and rethink our understanding of species barriers.
All workers in Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) colonies are hybrid and queens must mate with males in the distant related species, Messor structures, to maintain colony function. However, researchers found that some Iberian harvester ants populations did not have M. structure colonies nearby.
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“We had to face the facts and try to see if there was anything special in the Messor Ibericus colony,” Romiguier said.
On departing to resolve this paradox, Romigier and his team discover that the Queen of Iberians also laid eggs containing the male M. structure, and that these men ultimately fathered the workers. The discovery, published on September 3rd in Nature on September 3rd, is the first time an animal has been documented that produces offspring from other species as part of its normal life cycle.
“In the early stages, it was like a team joke,” Romigier said. “But the more we got the results, the more it became a hypothesis, not a joke.”
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Ants are eusosocial insects, and their colonies form a cooperative, hyperinorganic consisting primarily of infertile women called workers, forming a small number of reproductive women called queens. The male is present only to fertilize the queen during mating flights and dies soon.
The Queen mates once in her life and keeps sperm from this meeting in a special organ. She then pulls out of this sperm stash and lays a new egg containing one of three types of offspring: a queen, worker, or male.
However, Iberian harvester ants mating with males of their species can only produce a new queen. This is thought to be the result of the selfish queen gene. Here, the DNA of male M. ibericus ensures its survival across generations by biasing the larvae to produce a fertile queen rather than an infertile worker known as the “Crown Crime Crime.”
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To avoid this, the queen must use the sperm of the male M. structure to produce the workers.
This is why the existence of a prosperous, isolated M. ibericus colony was such a challenge.
To find answers, the researchers first sampled 132 men from 26 Iberian harvester ant colonies, M. I figured out whether there were male structures. They found that 58 was covered with hair and 74 was hairless. A closer look into the nuclear genomes of these ants subsets reveals that all hairy ones are M. ibericus and all bald ones are M. structurers.
However, this was not evidence that the Queen had layed male eggs of two different species. Therefore, the team sequenced mitochondrial DNA passed by the 24 mothers of M. structor males and M. It turns out that it came from the same mother as the male nest of ibericus.
“This was a detail that made me realize that ‘Maybe we’re working on something very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,” Romiguier said.
The team then separated 16 queens from the laboratory colony and looked at the loose-fitting genetic sequence of eggs. They found that 9% of the eggs contained M. structure ants. They then directly observed a single queen producing both species of males by monitoring the broth each week for 18 months.
Together, all these findings indicate that the Iberian harvester ante queen clones a male in the M. structure and does not pass on his own nuclear DNA. Researchers now need to identify the exact mechanism underlying this cloning and examine it once the mother’s DNA is removed.
Dennis Fournier, an evolutionary biologist and ecologist at the University of Brussels, Belgium’s Free University, was not involved in the study, but when he first learned about the finding, he said it was “science fiction-like.” “It’s about dropping the jaws! Most of us learn that the species’ boundaries are solid, but here’s the system where ants regularly cross them as part of their normal lives,” he told Live Science in an email.
The team calls this new reproductive system “Xenoparity,” meaning the birth of a different species. Romiguier said the team wasn’t sure exactly when the system first appeared in Iberian harvester ants, but M. It’s somewhere when ibericus and M. Structor split along different evolutionary paths five million years ago and thousands of years ago.
“This discovery is a great reminder to stay open to the unexpected,” Fournier said, saying the discovery opens new questions about nature’s cooperation, conflict and dependence. “We have found that such a system is possible, and it is exciting to think that old and inexplicable data may suddenly make sense in light of this discovery,” he added.
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