Some ant queens can produce offspring of more than one species – even when the other species is not known to exist in the nearby wild.

No other animal on Earth is known to do this, and it's hard for even scientists to believe.

"It's an absolutely fantastic, bizarre story of a system that allows things to happen that seem almost unimaginable," evolutionary biologist Jacobus Boomsma from the University of Copenhagen told Max Kozlov at Nature .

Some queen ants are known to mate with other species to produce hybrid workers, but Iberian harvester ants ( Messor ibericus ) on the island of Sicily go even further, blurring the lines of specieshood.

These queens can give birth to cloned males of another species entirely ( Messor structor ), with which they can mate to produce hybrid

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