Some ants queens can cause more than one type of offspring – even when other species are unknown that there is no nearby wild in nature.
No other animal on Earth does it, and even scientists find it difficult to believe.
“It’s an endlessly fantastic, strange system story that allows things that seem almost unimaginable,” Max Kozlov AT told Evolution Biologist Jacobus Boomsma from Copenhagen University Nature;
It is known that some Queen’s ants with other species produce hybrid staff, but Iberian combine ants (Reaper ibericus) Go even further on Sicilian Island, not lines of species.
These queens can give birth to cloned men of another species (Harvesting structure removal), with whom they can mate with hybrid workers.
Related: Ants Queens practices “hygiene cannibalism” from hard love
Their reproductive strategy is similar to “sexual domestication,” says researchers. Quins came to control the reproduction of another species they have long since exploited from the wild – much like people have domesticated dogs.
It seems that in the past Iberian ants stole another type of sperm from which they once belonged to create a man’s army M. Structor Clones you need to reproduce whenever you wanted.
This gets rid of the need for their wedding flights to find other species. They had what they needed at home.
YouTube thumbnail
According to genetic analysis, the offspring of the colony are two different species, but they still have the same mother.
Some are hairy M. Ibericuswhile others – without hair M. Structure – The nearest wild populations live more than a thousand kilometers.
The Queen can mate with any type of men in the colony to multiply. Mating with M. Ibericus Males will produce a new generation of queen while a couple M. Structor Men will cause more employees. So all colony staff are hybrids M. Ibericus and M. Structor;
M. Ibericus Quins lies men belonging to different species that differ in morphologically (symbolized by male symbols blue and red M. Ibericus and M. Structoraccordingly) and genetically. Everyone has the same mitochondria. (Juvé et al., Nature2025)
Both species were different from each other more than 5 million years ago, and yet today, today M. Structor There is a kind of parasite living in the Queen Colony. But she is hardly a victim.
Iberian Harvester Queen Ants controls what happens to her clone DNA. When it reproduces, she can do it asexual, creating her own clone. It can also fertilize the egg with its species of sperm or M. StructorOr it can “delete” its nuclear DNA and use egg as a container alone in its male DNA M. Structor Clones.
This means that its offspring may be related to her or with another species. The only similarity is that both groups are the DNA of the Queen Mitochondria. The result is a larger variety of colony without the need for wild neighboring species that could unite.
It also means that the ants of the Iberian combine belong to the “two types of superorganism”, which the researchers say “challenge the usual boundaries of individuality”.
M. Structor the men made by the men M. Ibericus The Queen does not look just like the men they make M. Structor Quins, but their genomes overlap.
Entomologist Jessica Purcell, who did not participate in the study, agrees that this M. Structor Males are not technically hybrids. “Instead,” she writes in the news and looks at the article Nature“I preliminary suggest that this M. Structor Men became an integral part M. Ibericus population ”.
“The inclusion of a whole genome from one species in the offspring of another can be seen as analogous to a system called horizontal gene transfer,” she adds, “receiving a new, combined genome and a separate genetic line.”
The investigation has been published Nature;