Annalee Newitz 🍜I cannot stop thinking about this paper about how Iberian harvester ants can produce offspring of two entirely different species. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02524-8
cc: @futurebird
Deborah Yoon Zachariaswoah, I put that in the same level of wtf as carcinization!
Michael Gemar@annaleen @futurebird It’s trippy as hell. Biology is always spitting in the face of human attempts at nice neat categories.
Siderea, Sibylla BostoniensisWhat a shame Octavia Butler isn't here to see this.
webshinra
Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle@futurebird had shared before some other news about this study, but I rather like how the Nature news explains it.
Jonathan Schofield
Winchell Chung ⚛🚀That is just begging to be used in a science fiction story. Because yet again truth is stranger than fiction
myrmepropagandistFantastic! Looking forwards to it.
0xC0DEC0DE07EA@futurebird @nyrath @annaleen grounded, but are you going to have an appendix like Peter Watts where you gesture at how and link to studies
llewelly@futurebird @nyrath @annaleen
I imagine the ants grounded it up by digging a deep hole and sticking a lighting rod in the hole so the current has somewhere to go when the reader is shocked
I imagine the ants grounded it up by digging a deep hole and sticking a lighting rod in the hole so the current has somewhere to go when the reader is shocked
Charlie Stross@futurebird @nyrath @annaleen It's in my stack of notes for the (currently merely hypothetical) third Authority novel. (It's a space opera setting that isn't in print yet, because I'm working on a huge mid-career pivot back to space opera in the next few years.)
cpm@futurebird @nyrath heck yeah! I should have known you were already on it.
Franchesca@nyrath @annaleen @futurebird Martha Wells wrote a whole series about a civilization that did this cross species thing. I highly recommend.
Carl (He/Him)@Frantasaur @nyrath @annaleen @futurebird Octavia Butler also had a series that had similarities. Decades ago. Also, she was Octavia Butler. (I love Wells, just bought one of her books. But Butler.)
@nitpicking @nyrath @annaleen @futurebird yeh, I have just started on Butler myself, got a lovely hardback box set of the parable of the sower and the parable of the talents. The first one was a really tough read emotionally speaking, so I had to take a break before tackling the second!
@annaleen @futurebird Reminds me of the Raksuran books by Martha Wells, she had this species mixing civilization that effectively did this. (Martha Wells is best known for the murderbot diaries)
David Moles@annaleen “This pathway seems analogous to domestication, as M. ibericus co-opted M. structor males into its life cycle, maintaining them as a clonal lineage rather than exploiting them from the wild” it’s like Sherri S. Tepper wrote a Star Trek TOS episode
@annaleen “evolving from sexual parasitism to sexual co-dependency” aren’t we all, babe, aren’t we all
TobyBartelsI'm tempted to be a lumper and say that they're the same species because they produce fertile offspring but … they never do that, do they? The hybrid workers are sterile[*], any new queen is pure M. ibericus, and the male offspring are split between pure M. ibericus and pure[**] M. structor, despite being laid by the same M. ibericus queen.
[*] Presumably. I couldn't read the Nature article, and the pop sci article that I found never explicitly said this, but that's usually how it works with female worker ants.
[**] Except for the mitochondrial DNA, which the M. structor males receive from the M. ibericus queen. But at least that DNA doesn't go anywhere.
Nazani@annaleen @futurebird Saving for my next argument with a creationist who bangs on about "kinds."
Bytebro 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇬🇱Sadly, there's a paywall, but this is fascinating stuff. I did not expect to learn so much about ants when I signed up to the Fedi!