Ant Queens Start Hybrid Offspring Utilizing Another Species’ Sperm

These Ants Are Different Species however Share a Mother

By Max Kozlov & Nature journal

A standard sort of ant in Europe breaks a elementary rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring which can be an entire completely different species. These queen Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) are sexual parasites that depend on the sperm of males of the ant species Messor structor. They use this sperm to breed a military of sturdy employee ants, that are hybrids of the 2 species.

Data now present that, within the absence of close by M. structor colonies, M. ibericus queens can clone male M. structor ants by laying eggs that include solely M. structor DNA of their nuclei. The findings have been printed in Nature on 3 September.

“It’s an absolutely fantastic, bizarre story of a system that allows things to happen that seem almost unimaginable,” says Jacobus Boomsma, an evolutionary biologist on the University of Copenhagen.

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DIY cloning

Iberian harvester ants co-exist with M. structor in some components of Europe, which has traditionally given M. ibericus queens an considerable provide of M. structor males to mate with.

But evolutionary biologist Jonathan Romiguier on the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier in France and his colleagues observed one thing unusual on the Italian island of Sicily: they discovered Iberian harvester ants all over the place however not a single colony of M. structor.

When the researchers peered inside colonies of the Iberian harvester ant, they discovered two forms of ant that appeared very completely different. Genetic analyses confirmed that the colonies contained each M. ibericus and M. structor, regardless of the dearth of M. structor populations on the island.

Further analyses solved the thriller: Iberian harvester queens clone M. structor ants to keep up a provide of their sperm. They then mate with these M. structor ants to supply hybrid employees that deal with the colony, together with by constructing the nest and foraging for meals. In impact, M. ibericus has domesticated M. structor and its genome, Romiguier says.

The two species diverged greater than 5 million years in the past, so it’s wild to see one species producing the opposite, Romiguier provides. “That’s almost how long ago humans and chimpanzees diverged.”

Intriguingly, when the researchers put the M. structor ants cloned by the Iberian harvester ants into an everyday M. structor colony, the bugs have been killed for being international invaders, regardless of wanting almost equivalent to these within the colony. That’s as a result of the cloned ants carried the pheromones of their Iberian cousins, so that they have been handled as enemies, Romiguier says. Another manner that they’re completely different from the ants within the M. structor colony is that, though the clones have solely M. structor DNA within the nuclei of their cells, they carry M. ibericus DNA of their mitochondria — the cells’ energy-producing items.

A profitable partnership?

Romiguier says that this domestication of the M. structor genome resembles the helpful partnership that led to mitochondria changing into a part of the eukaryotic cell multiple billion years in the past after a primitive host cell engulfed a bacterium. Today, eukaryotes — which embody all animals, crops and fungi — even have two distinct genomes of their cells: one within the nucleus and one within the mitochondria. But Boomsma doesn’t anticipate M. ibericus’s uncommon sexual parasitism to be almost as evolutionarily profitable as eukaryotes’ acquisition of mitochondria and unfold to different organisms.

“Ants are just amazing and force us to be open-minded to allow the discovery of unorthodox mating systems,” says Claudie Doums, an evolutionary ecologist on the Practical School of Advanced Studies in Paris.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 3, 2025.

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