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?
There are genes called "selfish genes" which cause a negative impact on the organism. Normally they would be selected out by evolution, but the "selfish" part means the gene is propagated to descendant organisms far more often than a regular gene would be. There are several mechanisms that can cause this, wikipedia has a summary.
In this case the ants have a "selfish gene" which greatly increases the probability of an egg being a queen, which makes it much harder for the colony to thrive.
As for the mixing of the species? You'd need a time travel machine to find out for sure, but the researchers noted that the species live in proximity and do mate together when in the same area. This would allow the queen to produce the needed workers. Evolution drove forward and somehow created a mechanism that allowed the ants to maintain the DNA required independent from the origin species. That's what the researchers are looking for now.
…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...).
My reasoning is: I’ve seen animals lose some of their species’ behavior when separated from their parents too early (for puppies and kittens).
They end up missing behaviors and abilities that seem to be passed generationally rather than innate.
If this is the case, isn’t there something lost when a species is only kept alive domesticated or in zoos? Even if later reintroduced to the wild.
>we mapped Illumina raw sequences from a pool of four wildcat individuals [two European wildcats (F. s. silvestris) and two Eastern wildcats (F. s. lybica)].
And the second article talks about the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx). It looks like they are very different species (same genus in the first, but only same family in the second). I do not really know how cat classification works, so maybe I miss some basic knowledge of the Felidae?
Technologically, dogs and wolves are the same species, but we can't let dogs replace the niche that was occupied by wolves.
Unlike cats, domestic dogs have been bred for specific tasks, so they do have enough differentiation that they couldn't fill each others' niches. It's crazy that a chihuahua is more closely related to a gray wolf than the gray wolf is to other wolves. Wolves themselves are so close to coyotes that they can interbreed. We could probably breed dogs to match any specific wolf niche, but chances are there's already wolves somewhere that are close enough.
Cats breeds, on the other hand, are rarely more than a set of superficial features.
Evolution and biology works on individuals. Species is just a simplification.
It's fairly easy to make definitions, and there are several. The real problem is that many biologists for many decades have been confused about whether we are attempting to make pragmatic definitions or whether we are uncovering "true answers" regarding biological discontinuities. It might not seem that bad if you don't consider geographic separation, but when you do, the literature turns into a total mess. The truth is, though it's unpalatable to many, that there's nothing about biological science that implies that the question "are these two geographically disjunct populations members of the same species?" has any particular answer.
(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.
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?
Embryos devoid of maternal DNA have been observed in other groups, with the fertilization of non-nucleate ovules or the elimination of the maternal genome after fertilization.
So the ovum is probably still involved, just without its own nuclear DNA (except when producing diploid workers).
cantor_S_drug•4mo ago
The Ants That Broke Biology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-O4_AwWpfI