Crazy ants’ strange genomes are a biological first | Hacker News Reader

Crazy ants’ strange genomes are a biological first

nature.com

65 pointssatoshiiii15 comments

Strange to see the parallels between a real ant, and the Chimera ants from Hunter X Hunter

TLDR:

Most male ants in most ant species are not diploid. Yellow crazy ants are an invasive species wreaking havoc in Southeast Asia and Oceania and their diploid males are apparently part of why. It allows a single queen ant to start a new colony.

To add on- not just diploid, but chimeric. AFAIK, this is the first known example of chimerism as a fundamental aspect of a species rather than an occasional mutation.

Thank you. I was wondering if I had left out anything important.

I think the tldr is that this animal is made out of some cells with one genome from one parent, and other cells with a completely other genome from the other parent, rather than a single new genome the same in all cells, which until now was unheard of.

Imagine if every other cell in your body was a transplant from someone else.

And the additional remarkable item, is that this is not just a random fluke that can happen to an individual, and not even merely normal for this species, but appears to actually be an integral neccessary part of the species life cycle. IE they use it and they wouldn't live without it.

While true, as a mother and environmental studies major, that wasn't the most important detail to me.

A. Human women become chimeras when they carry a fetus.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8155153

B. It's the reason for the headline -- their weird chimeric males -- but it seems more important to me that it facilitates invasive behavior by allowing a single ant to start a new colony.

YMMV, of course, and probably will.

Don't lots of species store sperm? I see nothing too remarkable about a single individual being able to start a colony unless no species do store sperm.

I have asked around. It appears you are correct.

There are other known ways of one individual being able to start a new population:

- The simplest and most obvious way to do this is to be a clonal organism.

- But you can go more complicated than that. You can have a female parthenogenetically give birth to males and then mate with those males. Aphids do this. (Actually, some cursory research suggests that aphids are more likely to give parthenogenetic birth to a batch of sons and daughters who then mate with each other?)

That species from other families do it does not make it less remarkable that these are the only ant species to do it.

By that (fetomaternal) microchimerism standard all human children are chimeras when they are born. The features of (fetomaternal) microchimerism would be better defined in the temporal dimension as a temporary genotype addition with respect to the lifespan of an organism.

Not unheard of, just rare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_chimera

And worth noting that if all goes well, you'd never know you were chimeric.

Unheard of. The wikipedia article is about individual flukes not species norms. This was covered in the article.

A human chimera would not have some cells with a genome from one parent and other cells with a separate genome from the other parent. That's not the way human reproduction or genetics works.

Yes, although the surprising thing here relates more to chimaerism than diploidy alone. And that should be "invade" and not "evade" in the crucial sentence in the closing paragraph: "crazy yellow ants’ chimaerism could contribute to the species ability to evade ecosystems".

The flexiblity afforded by chimaerism in this system reminds me a bit of the dikaryotic condition in many species of mushrooms (higher basidiomycete fungi). In this case the parental nuclei also do not fuse on fertilization (plasmogamy), but are maintained separately as a stable arrangement at a subcellular level. So you don't get individual cells having either one parental genome or the other, every cell is binucleate, having two parental genomes in two separate nuclei.

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