European ant is the first known animal to clone members of another species

Re:European ant is the first known animal to clone members o... by seszett on Thursday September 18, 2025 @03:10AM (#45286502)

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?

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Re:European ant is the first known animal to clone members o... by yorwba on Thursday September 18, 2025 @05:13AM (#45287401)

The paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09425-w says:

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).

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