This work benefited from the support of the @erc.europa.eu grant RoyalMess, hosted by @cnrs.fr , @isemevol.bsky.social and @umontpellier.bsky.social.
Article freely available here for more details: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#Xenoparity shows how sexual parasitism can evolve to a self-sufficient unit of selection, where two species bind their lifecycles. Question: When two species sexually depend on each other and are produced by the same colonies, how should we consider the resulting superorganism?

This reveals a new reproductive mode: #xenoparity —"giving birth to alien species". By becoming xenoparous, M. ibericus queens allowed themselves to expand their range, cloning M. structor males in their colonies and invading Southern Europe with hybrid workers.

⚠️Wilder: workers have two father types - wild males (from M. structor nests) or clones (only in M. ibericus nests). This suggests that queens domesticated M. structor males by cloning them from the wild. Fun detail: clonal vs. wild males look different, like pigs vs. boars🐗→🐷!

🔬Other key result: this queen's spermatheca contains sperm from both species. For cross-species cloning to occur, this means that maternal DNA in the ova has been fully replaced by M. structor DNA stored in the spermatheca #androgenesis.

Lab evidences now 🧪:
🥚When isolating M. ibericus queens in the lab, we found that ~10% of their eggs carried ONLY M. structor nuclear DNA.
🔎Even better: after monitoring ~50 colonies in the lab during 18 months, we observed male adults of both species laid by a single queen.

🔍 How did we reach this odd conclusion? Field evidences first: we found M. structor males within 26 M. ibericus colonies (11 populations). All have:
✅100% M. structor nuclear genome.
✳️Mitochondria matching the M. ibericus queens of the colony, suggesting they're their mothers.

💡To ensure a sperm supply to mass-produce their hybrid workers, we found that M. ibericus queens clone M. structor males.
➡️Result? Males from the same mother have distinct genomes and morphologies, as they belong to species that diverged over 5 million years ago.

🧬Sequencing 390 ant genomes (5 species) shows that Messor ibericus queens depend on M. structor sperm to produce all their workers.
⚠️Problem: these hybrid workers invaded southern Europe, while M. structor colonies are missing. How's possible? Where do the fathers come from?

Messor harvester ants dominate Southern Europe by collecting seeds, turning them into "ant bread"🥖.
But this is not the coolest thing about them: in some species, queens are sperm parasites, as they rely on sperm from other species to produce their workers.

Thanks for noticing it, here's a link for the raw data available in NCBI: trace.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Traces/?view...

The #OpenAccess #EditorsChoice article for the issue reports on the #phylogenomics of Messor harvester #ants (Hymenoptera: #Formicidae: Stenammini), and unravels their biogeographical origin and #diversification patterns.

Why not give it a read?
doi.org/10.1111/syen.12693

@selfishmeme.bsky.social

This is one of the most accurate coverage of the study I’ve seen (including written articles), it really deserves to be shared with both scientists and non-scientists!

Oh wow, I need to know now.

I drove myself crazy picking citations for this sentence. After spending a whole night hunting for which Greek philosopher might have said it first, I realized I didn’t want to spend another night figuring out how to format an Aristotle citation to comply with Nature’s guidelines.