alt Hacker NewsEuropean ant is the first known animal to clone members of another species
Comments
…suggesting we need to rethink our understanding of species barriers.
The vagueries of speciation has been especially exploitable by the conservatism/YIMBYism movement, where a trait common in one region but uncommon in others can be used to declare a common unthreatened animal as an endangered species, despite a lack of genetic divergence. It would be like declaring uncommonly red-haired Irish as not just an ethnicity but a separate species.
My favorite example of vagueries in species differentiation is a study that found only 13 genes that reliably differ between domestic cats and European and Near Eastern wildcats. (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1410083111) It really brings into question what domestication even is, considering that housecats are perfectly capable of supporting themselves outside of areas inhabited by humans. Their lack of differentiation from wildcats means that they can easily become invasive species in areas where they are introduced by humans.
It's impossible for a species to be invasive to its native land, but Poland has managed to simultaneously consider a group of animals with a mere bakers dozen of genes differentiating them, none of which hinder their ability to interbreed, as both "currently threatened with extinction in their natural habitat" (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6749728/) and an "invasive alien species" (https://apnews.com/article/science-poland-wildlife-cats-bird...).
I've always seen it from this perspective: If two animals can mate and produce an offspring that it will also be able to reproduce and be fertile than they are member of the same species. This is condition is sufficient but not necessary.
(ex a donkey and a horse can mate but will produce a mule which is sterile and so in my classification donkeys and horses are not anymore the same species).
So given the cloned male ants in turn mate with the queen they were all along the same species.
For those who prefer video version :
The Ants That Broke Biology
a rather stunning reminder that all taxonomies are cultural products, useful conceptually but not inviolable
The article personifies things a couple times and I always wonder about the actual mechanics when people do that.
It mentions selfish queen genes and how the DNA from the male of the species "ensures its propagation by applying pressure to larvae to be queens rather than infertile females." Does it then? The DNA is there in the egg whispering, "do it, cheat, you'd be an amazing queen, doooo itt"?
They write that the queen must use sperm from another species that it has stored to circumvent that. So the queen is thinking, "ah, pesky sneaky DNA, cheating. Here, I'll just let out, from my sperm storage organ where I store a bunch of sperm all mixed up, only sperm from another species, that'll teach that pesky DNA!"
Like what is actually happening in reality?
Interesting, I suppose it can work because male hymenopterans (ants, bees and wasps) are haploid, so the queen doesn't need two copies of the "foreign" genes to produce a male of the other species but just one copy, the one that she coincidentally got from a male from this foreign species. So the female can produce a male from another species without worrying about incompatibility with her own genes (apart from mitochondria).
However it does mean that the male clone has to develop directly from a sperm cell from its father (and the mitochondria from the ant queen) rather than an ovum, or am I wrong?