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One Mother Two Species

1:49:08 recording · AUTO · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

A queen ant clones males of another species, making one mother the parent of two species.

  1. One queen gives birth to two speciesIbericus queens produce both their own fertile males and fertile males whose genome is entirely Messor structor, with only the mother's mitochondria left behind.
  2. Sperm parasitism became domesticationQueens first needed wild Structor males to make hybrid workers, then evolved to clone those males themselves and could abandon the co-located species.
  3. The species rule just brokeThe authors coined a name for these females because a mother producing another species as part of her life cycle had never been seen.
Executive Summary AI
  • Vincent Racaniello and Nels Elde record Twevo episode 118 on September 10, 2025, a couple of weeks ahead of their usual monthly slot, with Nels joining from Salt Lake City.0:03
  • Before travelling to Boston and then Greece, Vincent lists his COVID-season precautions: a reusable $40 mask with a copper-infused insert, a booster taken last Saturday, high-dose flu vaccine and an already-completed RSV shot, because at over 65 he is at higher risk.4:40
  • Nels offers condolences on the death of David Baltimore, Vincent's postdoc mentor, and they revisit the 15-year-old TWiV 100 interview Vincent reposted, Baltimore's two weeks of experiments that found reverse transcriptase after Howard Temin's ten-year search, and his call to Temin so the two papers appeared back to back.10:26
  • The paper under discussion is 'One Mother for Two Species via Obligate Cross-Species Cloning in Ants', open access in Nature, from mostly European groups with senior author Jonathan Rumminger at the University of Montpellier, built over more than a decade of fieldwork, population genetics and lab colonies.24:01
  • Sequencing 390 individuals across five harvester ant species, mitochondrial data showing every male carries Ibericus mitochondria, and a year and a half watching one queen that yielded seven fertile males — two hairless with Structor DNA, five hairy with Ibericus DNA — show Messor ibericus queens clone males of Messor structor, a species that diverged about 5 million years ago and whose nearest co43:17
Key Quote
“But science is something where you all should join together and pool your expertise, not say I did it first.”
— Vincent Racaniello18:12
Key Quote
“And I said, oh my God, what am I doing here?”
— Vincent Racaniello20:16
Key Quote
“How could one mother give birth to two distinct species?”
— Nels Elde25:20