Ants that seem to defy biology – They lay eggs that hatch into another species

This is a really interesting discovery. In ants it's apparently common for one species to stop being able to produce workers on their own, and use the sperm from another species instead.

In this case, that happened. But if you do that, you can only expand as far as the other species expands. So you can expand further if you can find a way to keep the males of that species around with you.

This species does that by having a reproductive pathway that, if a queen is fertilized by that 'domesticated' species, the DNA of the 'host' species is removed from the eggs. So you get an ant that has none of the host's DNA. Except they do inherit the mitochondrial DNA (it always comes from the mother). The 'domesticated' males and the 'wild-type' males do look slightly different - it's not clear if this is because of the mitochondrial DNA or because they're raised differently or what.

I read someone compare the domesticated species to a 'superorganism organelle' - just like an archaea cell sucked up a bacteria to become a eukaryote, the host species sucked up the domesticated species to become some combination of both.

Wild to think what other crazy ways of living and makin babies must be out there that we haven't figured out yet.