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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: 0.014s | 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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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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NewJazz ◴[19 Sep 25 18:23 UTC] No.45304796[source]▶
Leviticus rightfully instructs you not to eat bats, but it seems to mistake them for special birds rather than mammals.
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1. rsynnott ◴[19 Sep 25 22:39 UTC] No.45307596[source]▶
Wait, is there a _specific_ prohibition? Like, they fail Old Testament dietary rules miserably _anyway_.
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2. NewJazz ◴[20 Sep 25 00:42 UTC] No.45308605[source]▶
These are the birds you are to regard as unclean and not eat because they are unclean: the eagle, the vulture, [a bunch of other birds] and the bat"

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2011:...

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3. rsynnott ◴[20 Sep 25 09:57 UTC] No.45311927[source]▶
Aaah, right, I suppose if you’re assuming it’s a bird it _would_ need a specific call-out, yeah. I was assuming it’d be covered by the hooves-and-stomachs stuff, but if you don’t think it’s a mammal in the first place that wouldn’t work.

(From the above: “Bible Gateway is currently unavailable to consumers in the United Kingdom and European Union due to technical issues.” I am now very curious just which EU regulation the bible website was worried about.)