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

(www.smithsonianmag.com)
429 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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treyd ◴[19 Sep 25 20:59 UTC] No.45306506[source]▶
The actual space is a lot smaller than it looks. Many amino acids have multiple codons that encode for them. You can also exclude cases where you have repeating stop codons (which detatch the RNA from the ribosome).

There's lots of processes that favor certain patterns over others, only considering the biochemistry of the cell, not even the fitness of the animal.

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alphazard ◴[19 Sep 25 21:20 UTC] No.45306770[source]▶
> Many amino acids have multiple codons that encode for them.

I didn't know this. I suspect this evolved because some amino acids are more useful than others, and increasing the probability of encoding for them was beneficial.

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1. robbiep ◴[20 Sep 25 02:04 UTC] No.45309451[source]▶
Have a read (rather than guessing) - it’s fascinating! Your other reply has a good insight but on more of a related topic but the primary reason this exists is for error correction. So approx one third of single nucleotide mutations have no change on the expression of the DNA or protein. And some of those that do change the amino acid are actually conservative; ie changing a basic amino acid to another basic amino acid which may still end up folding in the same way