Max Kozlov in Nature:
A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species. These queen Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) are sexual parasites that rely on the sperm of males of the ant species Messor structor. They use this sperm to breed an army of robust worker ants, which are hybrids of the two species. Data now show that, in the absence of nearby M. structor colonies, M. ibericus queens can clone male M. structor ants by laying eggs that contain only M. structor DNA in their nuclei. The findings were published in Nature on 3 September1. “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 at the University of Copenhagen.
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