Ants have weird family lives, if we may call it that. Queens produce males that overwhelmingly become workers (imagine human males doing all the work). Only one will eventually mate with a queen. The queen of the Iberian harvester ant Messor ibericus (let’s call it just the Iberian ant) does a stranger thing; she produces males of two different species. One set has the genome of the Iberian ant; the other has the entire genome of male ants of a different species of harvester ant Messor strictor. Let’s call that the mountain ant.
The unusual story grabbed the attention of Yves Juve’ at the University of Montpellier in France and his team. They were puzzled to see the mountain ant workers far from where mountain ant colonies exist. The eggs that will produce mountain ant males have been cleared of the Iberian genome, leaving only the Iberian mitochondria as is usual in eggs. The original mountain ant genome was captured in a cross-species mating and then kept intact (lotsa detail).In a commentary, Jessica Purcell of UC Riverside says that this system challenges the idea of a species as a group that is isolated from reproduction with other groups. Maybe it’s a play on the adage, If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org
Source: Nature, 9 October 2025, pp. 289 ff. and 372 ff.
Image: El Pais
