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Queen ants in southern Europe produce male clones of a completely totally different species — tearing up the playbook of reproductive biology and suggesting we have to rethink our understanding of species boundaries.
The staff in Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) colonies are all hybrids, with queens needing to mate with males from a distantly associated species, Messor structor, to maintain the colony functioning. But researchers discovered that some Iberian harvester ant populations don’t have any M. structor colonies close by.
“That was very, very abnormal. I mean, it was kind of a paradox,” study co-author Jonathan Romiguier, an evolutionary biologist on the University of Montpellier, informed Live Science. The workforce initially believed there was a sampling situation, however they went on to search out 69 areas the place this was the case.
“We had to face the facts and try to see if there is something special within Messor ibericus colonies,” Romiguier mentioned.
In getting down to resolve this paradox, Romiguier and his workforce discovered that queen Iberian harvester ants additionally lay eggs containing male M. structor ants, with these males finally fathering the employees. This discovery, revealed Sept. 3 within the journal Nature, is the primary time any animal has been recorded producing offspring from one other species as a part of their regular life cycle.
“In the early stages, it was kind of a joke in the team,” Romiguier mentioned. “But the more we got results, the more it became a hypothesis and not a joke anymore.”
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Ants are eusocial bugs, which means their colonies kind cooperative super-organisms predominantly made up of infertile females, known as staff, and a small variety of reproductive females, known as queens. Males solely exist to fertilize queens throughout their mating flight and die quickly after.
Queens solely mate as soon as of their lives and retailer the sperm from this assembly in a particular organ. She then attracts from this sperm stash to put new eggs containing considered one of three forms of offspring: queens, staff or males.
However, Iberian harvester ants mating with males of their very own species can solely produce new queens. This is regarded as a results of selfish queen genes, the place the DNA from male M. ibericus ensures its survival throughout generations by biasing larvae to provide fertile queens fairly than infertile staff — generally known as “royal cheaters.”
To keep away from this, queens should use sperm from male M. structor ants to provide their staff.
This was why the presence of thriving remoted M. ibericus colonies was such a conundrum.
To discover solutions, the researchers first sampled 132 males from 26 Iberian harvester ant colonies to determine whether or not there have been M. structor males current. They discovered that 58 had been lined in hair and 74 had been hairless. A more in-depth inspection of the nuclear genomes of a subset of those ants revealed that every one bushy ones had been M. ibericus and all bald ones had been M. structor.
But this was not proof that the queens had been laying male eggs of two totally different species — there may have been some hidden M. structor queens producing the odd male. So the workforce sequenced the mitochondrial DNA, which is handed down by the mom, of 24 of the M. structor males, and located it got here from the identical mom because the M. ibericus male nestmates.
“This was the detail that made me realize that ‘maybe we are on to something very, very, very big,'” Romiguier mentioned.
The workforce then separated 16 queens from laboratory colonies and seemed on the genetic sequences of their freshly laid eggs. They discovered that 9% of their eggs contained M. structor ants. They then straight noticed a single queen producing males of each species by monitoring its broods weekly over an 18-month interval.
Together, all these findings present that Iberian harvester ant queens are cloning M. structor males and never passing on any of their very own nuclear DNA. Researchers now have to pinpoint the precise mechanism underlying this cloning, Romiguier mentioned, and discover out at what level the maternal DNA is eliminated.
Denis Fournier, an evolutionary biologist and ecologist on the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, who was not concerned within the analysis, mentioned that it was “almost like science fiction” when he first discovered of this discovery. “It’s jaw-dropping! Most of us learn that species boundaries are firm, yet here is a system where ants regularly cross them as part of normal life,” he informed Live Science in an e mail.
The workforce have known as this new reproductive system “xenoparity,” which means the delivery of a unique species. Romiguier mentioned the workforce aren’t precisely certain when this method first emerged within the Iberian harvester ants, however it’s someplace between when M. ibericus and M. structor cut up alongside totally different evolutionary paths 5 million years in the past and some thousand years in the past.
“This discovery is a great reminder to stay open to the unexpected,” Fournier mentioned, noting that the discovering opens up new questions on cooperation, battle and dependency in nature. “Now that we know such a system is possible, it’s exciting to think that old, puzzling data might suddenly make sense in light of this discovery,” he added.
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