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

(www.smithsonianmag.com)
429 points sampo | 3 comments | 19 Sep 25 12:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.643s | source
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titanomachy ◴[19 Sep 25 15:58 UTC] No.45303136[source]▶
Fantastic science, very cool discovery. I'm surprised to learn that ant colonies don't really produce males in lab conditions, that must make this research incredibly difficult.

> For M. ibericus, this adaptation ensures they have plenty of workers, which are responsible for many important tasks in a colony

I don't understand this part, though. It doesn't address why it is beneficial for the workers to be hybrids instead of pure M. ibericus. At some point M. ibericus lost the ability to make non-hybrid workers, but that must have happened after.

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1. yorwba ◴[19 Sep 25 17:16 UTC] No.45304083[source]▶
If ibericus/structor hybrid females become sterile workers, but pure ibericus females become queens, that increases the share of ibericus genes in the next generation. So as soon as a mutation arose that had this effect, it outcompeted all other lineages, but also made ibericus dependant on hybridization with structor males to produce workers for the colony. The adaptation that is the focus of the article works around this drawback by letting ibericus colonies produce their own supply of structor males.

So there are roughly three evolutionary phases:

1. Hybridization is common, but largely inconsequential.

2. Hybrid queen elimination.

3. Male cloning.

replies(1): >>45305365 #
2. Jensson ◴[19 Sep 25 19:21 UTC] No.45305365[source]▶
It does mean the males can't evolve further though, so at some point this will die out when situation changes and those males can no longer survive as well.
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3. Spivak ◴[19 Sep 25 21:23 UTC] No.45306802[source]▶
Maybe slower evolution but bacteria reproduce by cloning and they have no trouble evolving.