This ant is defying nature, and science, as we know it
Can animals make clones of other species? A recent study found that a certain ant can
Did you know that scientists have made an exciting discovery about an ant species native to southern Europe?
They recently discovered that Iberian harvester ant queens are able to produce offspring of a completely different species, going against our current understanding of nature and biology.
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What makes up an ant colony?
Ant colonies are made up of three groups, called castes: queens, workers, and males.
Unlike most other ants, queen Iberian harvester ants don’t produce worker ants from the DNA of male Iberian harvester ants. Thanks to a selfish gene, any ant born from this pairing will most likely become a fertile queen, creating a lack of infertile workers to support the colony.
This isn’t an issue when it comes to producing male ants, however, since males only have one set of DNA, as opposed to two in females. Basically, queens don’t need to mate to produce males.
Iberian harvester ants are native to southern Europe. Emanuele Santarelli/iNaturalist (CC BY-SA 4.0)
So how do queens breed workers?
To produce female worker ants, the Iberian harvester queens must mate with males of another species. In a study published in the journal Nature, scientists found that many of the female workers in the nests they studied were a hybrid between the Iberian harvester ant and Messor structor ant (a distantly related species). In fact, Messor structor males were found living in the nests with the Iberian harvester ants.
While cross-species mating isn’t unheard of, what puzzled the scientists was that there were no Messor structor ant nests for thousands of kilometres around the study site.
While also being a species of harvester and also native to Europe, Messor structor ants are distant cousins of Iberian harvester ants. Roman/iNaturalist (CC BY 4.0)
Ants cloning ants
By looking at the ants’ genetic makeup, the scientists were able to learn that the male Messor structor ants in the nests had mothers of the Iberian harvester ant instead of their own species. This was because they had mitochondrial DNA from the Iberian harvester ants, which can only be passed down from a mother. However, the rest of their DNA was from their own species.
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Meanwhile, male Messor structor ants from their own nests thousands of kilometres away had mitochondrial DNA from Messor structor queens.
For this to happen, the study suggests that an Iberian harvester queen must have mated with a wild male Messor structor and stored his genetic material to produce male clones. The clones then mate with the queen, allowing her to keep making infertile workers to support the colony.
This discovery goes against what we currently know about animal reproduction and opens the floodgates for more studies to look into other species and what can be done with this newfound knowledge.
Thumbnail image credit to Emanuele Santarelli/iNaturalist (CC BY-SA 4.0) (left image), and Roman/iNaturalist (CC BY 4.0) (right image).