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Comment by Brian_K_White | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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