Attack of the Clones - Ant species clones themselves.
IT IS often said that males and females are different species. For the little fire ant, that seems to be literally true.
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.
The only time they reproduce conventionally is to produce workers, says Denis Fournier from the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in Belgium, a member of the team that discovered the phenomenon (Nature, vol 435, p 1230). But workers are sterile and never pass on their genes.
This is the first reported case in the animal kingdom of males reproducing exclusively by cloning, although male honeybees do it occasionally.
Continued at source…
