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

(www.smithsonianmag.com)
429 points sampo | 11 comments | 19 Sep 25 12:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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corygarms ◴[19 Sep 25 15:17 UTC] No.45302603[source]▶
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.
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sidewndr46 ◴[19 Sep 25 15:23 UTC] No.45302659[source]▶
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?

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tsimionescu ◴[19 Sep 25 15:58 UTC] No.45303135[source]▶
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.

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soperj ◴[19 Sep 25 16:11 UTC] No.45303319[source]▶
Man, the bible missed all of this when they were talking about the two animals of every species on the Ark. What else did they leave out?
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1. rsynnott ◴[19 Sep 25 16:47 UTC] No.45303749[source]▶
This always struck me as a bit odd, because it was a somewhat common belief around then, and for long after, that many animals reproduced by abiogenesis anyway. Why bother taking two mice on the ark; everyone knows that mice spontaneously emerge from river mud!

(It’s possible that this was just a Greek quirk and never made it to Palestine, I suppose.)

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2. IAmBroom ◴[19 Sep 25 17:14 UTC] No.45304073[source]▶
The idea persisted into the Middle Ages. Can't say for certain that it was continuous, however; the medieval supporters quoted Aristotle et al.
3. philistine ◴[19 Sep 25 17:48 UTC] No.45304448[source]▶
Listen, we still don't know how eels reproduce. Our knowledge has never been all inclusive and properly disseminated. The fearful cave-dwelling scribes who wrote the old testament were clearly not up to date on their biology.
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4. dormento ◴[19 Sep 25 18:22 UTC] No.45304774[source]▶
I didn't know either, but hn came to the rescue. In case you're one of today's lucky 10000:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-...

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5. jdiff ◴[19 Sep 25 19:09 UTC] No.45305243{3}[source]▶
I think eels are safely outside the domain of knowledge where anyone could safely say "everybody knows that!"
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6. zrezzed ◴[19 Sep 25 20:13 UTC] No.45305995{4}[source]▶
https://xkcd.com/2501/
7. rsynnott ◴[19 Sep 25 22:27 UTC] No.45307488[source]▶
Well, no, I’m actually surprised that whoever wrote the Old Testament _was_ up enough on their biology (or at least aligned with biology, however accidentally) to realise that most animals reproduce sexually. This certainly wasn’t the conventional view in the Greek world, say, nor was it in the West until the 18th century or so.
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8. giveita ◴[19 Sep 25 23:32 UTC] No.45308064{3}[source]▶
What was this view exactly? They would have know their pets and farm animals reproduced sexually. I guess it isn't a leap to think all mammals? So what animals did they think did not?
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9. aetherson ◴[20 Sep 25 00:28 UTC] No.45308484{4}[source]▶
Mice, flies, vermin of various kinds that seemed able to show up anywhere from no obvious parents.
10. jamiek88 ◴[20 Sep 25 00:54 UTC] No.45308687[source]▶
We do now!! It’s fascinating. Look it up!
11. rsynnott ◴[20 Sep 25 09:54 UTC] No.45311910{4}[source]▶
So, we tend to think that it’s just common sense that most animals reproduce sexually (actually I think most people would assume that _all_ animals do; in fact, as with most things, there are edge cases), but, well, to an extent that’s because we already know that. The historical view was a bit different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

This isn’t even the only weird idea that people used to have about reproduction; there’s also stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth