Cloning In The Animal Kingdom

tanveer1979 writes "The New Scientist is carrying an interesting article on cloning in nature." From the article: "The ant Wasmannia Auropunctata, which is native to Central and South America but has spread into the US and beyond, has opted for a unique stand-off in the battle of the sexes. Both queens and males reproduce by making genetically identical copies of themselves - so males and females seem to have entirely separate gene pools. Conventional reproduction happens only to produce workers. This is the first instance in the animal kingdom where males reproduce exclusively by cloning, though male honeybees do it occasionally." National Geographic is also carrying the story.

Comments

cloning uncommon?

[evenprime]

Conventional reproduction happens only to produce workers.

But aren't most of the ants in a colony workers?

Re:cloning uncommon?

[ZosX]

That is correct. They are also sterile too AFAIK. I believe that the workers are by definition female, but incapable of reproducing. The male ants really only exist to mate with the queen to create more female workers. I'm sure they have some other small functions, but not much else. In the event of a queen dying in a bee's nest, I believe that the male bees have a way of producing another female queen, but I forget how it works. (Its been years since I read about bees)

Bees and ants are some of the most fascinating creatures on the planet in a lot of ways. They almost seem to posess a collective conscious and part of that is the ability for them to communicate with each other in a rapid efficient manner.

Basically the queen in a nest of either species exists mostly to reproduce. Everything else exists to support that. The workers take care of and feed their larvae young. Ever see ants carrying little white things that look like rice? That is them moving their larvae about. The nests they build are amazingly well developed. Ditto for bees.

If you ever get a chance you should search google for bits of info on the supercolony of ants that has pretty much migrated across huge swaths of europe. It seems that the colony is completely interconnected as the ants all cooperate. In a lot of ways, it is the Borg of ant colonies.

Bugs are weird. Lets hope they never start hating humans. We'd lose really quick.

Re:cloning uncommon?

[h4rm0ny]

I googled for it as you suggested. And now I'm going to have nightmares for a month.

The link is here. It also contains a link to an article on the Fire Ants that attacked Australia.

Re: Ants in the Pants

[ViX44]

I find it interesting that they speak as though the male ants had an intelligence that decided to modify its genes as described. I tried changing my genes and it didn't help me run faster, jump higher, or gain the ability to remember where I put my keys. Usually, I don't find those bad boys until I change my jeans.

Does Cloning Help...?

[__aaclcg7560]

Whether they clone or not doesn't concern me. They are all equal in my eyes when I'm holding the Raid can.

Reproduction through cloning

[Faust7]

This is the first instance in the animal kingdom where males reproduce exclusively by cloning

Are you kidding? How do you think Slashdotters reproduce?

Obvious first though from certain "parties"

[sabernet]

They are an afront to Jesus and the holy book and thy sinning, cloning, ants that dare copulate in an unnatural way must be cast down to the lair of Satan.

nomenclature

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my pet peeves is how the media in general consistently screws up binomial nomenclature...it's not Wasmannia Auropunctata - the correct form is Wasmannia auropunctata...the genus name is capitalized, the species name is not...ever! Petty? Maybe...but only if you feel that being correct is not important...non-scientists just don't take the time to understand & then blame scientists for not telling them...so consider yourself told. :)

Re: Ants in the Pants

[jcgf]

I remember back in the '80s we used to modify our jeans with a pair of scissors. That didn't help us run faster, jump higher, or gain the ability to remember where we put our keys either. Oh well 2 down, ininitely many more to go.

Human hives are already here....

[ZosX]

In a lot of ways I think that the above is true. However, I don't really know if the hive mentality would ever really truly fit for humans though as they tend to show many more tendancies towards the herd or the pack mentality. Once you start thinking of most humans as sheep, the world starts making more sense and starts becoming a lot more depressing. Face it. People just don't want to think about the world and what is going on in it. I know that there are exceptions, but most people do not want the responsibility that comes with knowledge of their world and are much more content sitting in the comfort of their low crime cookie-cutter suburb watching network television than worrying about all hte really terrible things that are happening to people all over the globe.

Hell, if people would just start thinking of how much freaking garbage they produce on a weekly basis and the big fucking hole in the woods that someone dug and lined with plastic to dump it all...oh hell, what's the fucking use?

No wonder people get depressed.

Here in the mechanics' garage...

[gardyloo]

"This apparently gave males both the time and the means to evolve a counterattack--converting some of the workers into males."



Huh. Around here, we hang up posters of nekkid queen ants. Oooooh, those unarticulated segements! Kind of makes you want to pupate, doesn't it?

Here come the christians...

[kd5ujz]

But..but..they will not have a soul.

Colony genetics

[scaryfish]

Ants (and bees) have some pretty interesting genetics going on. The evolutionary reason behind why they form hives and colonies is kind of counter-intuitive - why would a worker give up its reproductive potential?

Bees are haplo-diploid. That means that females are diploid (2 copies of every chromosome) but males are haploid, forming from unfertilised eggs. So when eggs are fertilised by males, the offspring (workers) end up having 1/2 their mother's DNA but all of their fathers. This means that unlike "normal" sexual reproduction, siblings share 3/4 of their DNA on average, which is more than they could share with their own offspring. So it is in their genes best interest to help produce more siblings than to produce their own offspring.

Re:Evolutionary dead end?

[(negative video)]

How do they manage to survive as species without the benefit of variation from sexual reproduction?

The workers, which are most exposed to the big nasty world, get half their genes from each parent. That gives some variation, and the (cloned) fertile ants have their food and water thoroughly filtered by the workers, which gives them protection that most parthenogenic species don't get. This genetic system was only recently discovered and the investigations are very preliminary, so it isn't yet known if crossing-over occurs rarely.

Re:small case species

[lav-chan]

You mispunctuated 'it's', you misspelt 'auropunctata', you forgot a comma before 'not', you used a comma to link two independent clauses, you forgot a comma before 'though', and you didn't end your second sentence (ellipses aren't end punctuation marks, although that's probably arguable). No chance in hell you would catch that, though.

Re:Anyone seen the print edition?

[jmauro]

A more in depth explination of the situation is provided on Pharyngula, here