JUVÉ, Y. et al. Nature. 2025M. ibericus males (right) and M. structor males live together in the same colonyJUVÉ, Y. et al. Nature. 2025
The Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) exhibits an extremely rare phenomenon: females produce male offspring not only of their own species, but also of another, M. structor. According to a study led by the universities of Montpellier and Lille in France and Lausanne in Switzerland, mating with M. ibericus males produces the next generation of queens, while mating with M. structor males, who also live in the colony, produces additional workers, which are therefore hybrids. This is possible because when fertilizing her egg, the queen eliminates her own nuclear DNA and uses her egg exclusively as a receptacle for the DNA of the M. structor male. The male offspring carry distinct genomes, but with the same mitochondrial DNA as the queen; externally, what primarily distinguishes them is the amount of hair, which is more abundant in M. ibericus. The result is greater diversity in the colony without requiring a neighboring wild species with which to mate. The two species diverged from each other more than 5,000,000 years ago. The closest wild populations of M. structor live more than 1,000 kilometers from the island of Sicily, Italy, where M. ibericus is more common (Nature, October 9).
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