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

(www.smithsonianmag.com)
426 points sampo | 1 comments | 19 Sep 25 12:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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alphazard ◴[19 Sep 25 15:56 UTC] No.45303102[source]▶
If you take the idea of genes as the target of evolution seriously, then every possible "bargain" between different genes that moves towards a pareto optimal for those genes, will eventually be discovered through the brute force search.
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jcims ◴[19 Sep 25 18:36 UTC] No.45304909[source]▶
I still struggle with the brute force search a bit. Just naively a very small gene has 4^500 possible combinations.
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1. didibus ◴[19 Sep 25 20:39 UTC] No.45306274[source]▶
It's not brute force search, more like stochastic sampling of random variants. It's a directed search where feedback from the environment prunes and weights the search space, and reproduction is a stochastic process biased by fitness. And fitness is defined by the survival and chances of successful mating, aka reproductive success.

Basically, your sex drive is the main search optimization :p

Edit: This is essentially how genetic algorithms in computer science work. They’re often remarkably effective at finding good solutions without needing brute force.