Alt heds: Queen Ants Spawn Cloned Ant Workers From a Different Species / These ‘Sexual Parasite’ Queen Ants Spawn Workers From a Different Ant Species / These ‘Sexual Parasite’ Queen Ants Breed an Army of Hybrid Ant Workers

Ant life can be brutal . And the queens that rule over each colony are suitably ruthless—even bending the rules of biology a little to create their own armies of hybrid clones to do their bidding.

In a Nature paper published September 3, researchers describe how queen Iberian harvester ants ( Messor ibericus ) are able to spawn offspring from an entirely different ant species. The reason why is that the queens appear to keep their own reserves of sperm from males of another harvester ant species, Messor structor , cloning them using the males’ sperm to produce

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