Ant queens clone another species
Revenge of the Clones?
One ant species clones another.
That challenges Darwinian storytelling.
by John D. Wise, PhD
Darwin’s “Fatal” Ant Problem
In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin confessed a difficulty so severe he feared it might sink his entire theory:
I … will confine myself to one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory. I allude to the neuters or sterile females in insect-communities: for these neuters … being sterile … cannot propagate their kind.[1]
How could natural selection explain workers that never reproduce? Darwin wrestled mightily with this “fatal” objection, and though evolutionary biologists have proposed solutions, the puzzle has never entirely gone away.
And now, as if to taunt him from beyond the grave, the ants are back — with a twist even stranger than sterile workers.
“Almost Like Science Fiction”
‘Almost like science fiction’: European ant is the first known animal to clone members of another species.” (Live Science,12 Sept 2025),
Not long ago, the sweet potato genome reminded us that evolutionary “family trees” often look like mosaics rather than tidy lines. Now ants are showing us that reproductive rules themselves can be defied.
A species of ant found scurrying across southern Europe is the first animal found that clones males of another species.
In the ant species Messor ibericus, queens produce males not only of their own kind but also of a closely related species, Messor structor — a previously unknown reproductive strategy for which the authors coined the term “xenoparity.”
This discovery is so unusual that it invites comparison to laboratory techniques humans only very recently developed.
Ant Biology 101: Reproduction
Ants belong to the insect order Hymenoptera, which includes bees, ants, and wasps. In hymenoptera the sex of an individual is determined by whether they develop from a fertilized or an unfertilized egg. Geneticists call this haplodiploidy: fertilized eggs develop into diploid females – queens or workers with two sets of chromosomes, like human beings. Unfertilized eggs develop into haploid males with only one set of chromosomes; their role is to fertilize the queen. In hymenoptera a typical colony has one (or a few at most) reproductive “queens” and a large workforce of sterile females. It was this oddity that Darwin thought “insuperable” and nearly “fatal” to his theorizing.
Queens mate, sometimes only once, and store sperm in a spermatheca, using it over time: fertilized eggs → females; unfertilized eggs → males. That simple pattern is what makes the M. ibericus case so striking.
The Plot Twist: Queens That Birth “Strangers”
Messor ibericus colonies support a workforce composed of first-generation hybrid workers. These workers’ nuclear genomes are approximately half M. ibericus (maternal) and half M. structor (paternal), indicating that queens use M. structor sperm to fertilize eggs (M. ibericus) that become female workers. That hybrid-worker system itself is known in some Messor populations, but M. ibericus adds a wholly novel twist in its male production.
Researchers sampled males from multiple colonies and found two distinct male species in M. ibericus nests:
- M. ibericus males — conventional haploid males produced in the expected way from unfertilized eggs of the M. ibericus queens.
- M. structor males, whose nuclear genomes are M. structor, yet their mitochondrial DNA is unmistakably maternal (M. ibericus).
STOP!
If you aren’t shocked, you haven’t understood what I just reported to you. To drive the point home, allow me to quote the opening line from the film Stuart Little,[2] based on the book by E. B. White:
When Stuart Little was born, his mother, Mrs. Frederick C. Little, was a little surprised. She knew she had given birth to a boy, but she had not expected him to be a mouse.
Admittedly, this is a whimsical extreme, but at a scaled-down level, this is precisely what occurs regularly in M. ibericus colonies – another species is born from the eggs of their queen. They carry maternal mitochondria of M. ibericus, but their nuclear DNA is another species altogether! They are not hybrids, like the workers, but fully viable and fertile M. structor males.[3]
Science fiction, indeed!
What’s Going On?
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The researchers can’t yet describe (the precise cytological steps) how this happens. The evidence comes from careful genotyping of eggs and adults, not from watching the process under a microscope. But the outcome resembles techniques familiar in recent biotechnology:
- Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT), the cloning method that produced Dolly the sheep.
- Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy (MRT), a method designed to prevent genetic disease.
Unlike humans, who manage these procedures rarely and with high failure rates, these queens pull it off naturally, reliably, and across generations.
We also do know queens store sperm from both species in their spermathecae. Whether sperm from different species are physically compartmentalized within the spermatheca, or whether molecular selection occurs at egg activation, is unknown. Those are precisely the cytological experiments the authors of this study call for.
[See sidebar for further details]
Why This Matters
This system upends several expectations:
- Reproductive isolation: usually seen as a wall between species, here it is porous in a stable and functional way. “Kind” seems a much more apt designation than species here.
- Predictable sex determination: haplodiploidy is supposed to be simple, yet these ants produce males with another species’ genome. It is no longer as simple as “unfertilized egg = male” in the case of the M. Ibericus queen producing M. structor males.
- Gradualism: evolutionary theory assumes complex systems arise step by step, but this reproductive strategy appears as a ready-made whole, with no sign of half-formed intermediates; like the fossil record in miniature, there are no transitions.
Beyond the Ant Hill
The discovery of “xenoparity” in Messor ibericus is more than an oddity in the insect world. It highlights a pattern we keep encountering: life’s systems are richer, stranger, and more integrated than evolutionary theories predict, or can easily explain. Human laboratories, after decades of effort, manage nuclear and mitochondrial transfers only with great difficulty, expense, and frequent failure. Ant queens do it beneath our feet, without fanfare, flawlessly, and across generations.
Evolutionists assure us that this, too, must be the product of blind trial and error — though the missing intermediates and ad hoc narratives tell a different story.
Creationists point to foresight: systems front-loaded with robustness and adaptability, not cobbled together piecemeal.
The ants are ahead of the scientists. Perhaps another “abominable mystery”?
But there is a deeper resonance. As we argued in our last essay, the finite continually presses against the infinite, like an asymptote forever approaching its transcendent curve. At every scale — from genomes scrambled beyond evolutionary storytelling to ant colonies rewriting the rules of reproduction — we glimpse hints that life’s intelligibility comes from beyond itself.
In this sense, the ants testify not just to biological ingenuity, but to the inadequacy of reductionist accounts. Their silent and unseen laboratories point upward: from the dust of the earth, toward the wisdom of a Designer whose purposes and designs exceed our models.
Postscript: Scientific Predictions Collide
What should a reproductive system like this lead us to expect from future research?
- Evolutionary perspective:
Darwinian theory assumes that new systems must arise gradually, through incremental modifications that confer selectable advantages. If that is the case, we should expect to find evidence of intermediates — queens fumbling with partial or failed attempts at cross-species reproduction, hybrid males that are non-viable, or unstable colony dynamics that would have been “weeded out” by natural selection. Instead, the system appears integrated, robust, and reproducible across multiple colonies. Evolutionary biologists are left with just-so stories: it must have evolved, though the evidence shows no gradual path. - Creation/design perspective:
A design framework anticipates robustness and foresight. From this angle, the M. ibericus system fits a paradigm where reproductive strategies are front-loaded with flexibility, enabling colonies to sustain themselves through unusual but effective means. No trial-and-error intermediates are necessary, and no ad hoc narratives need to be retrofitted onto data. What looks like a conundrum for gradualism reads instead as evidence of purposeful design — a finite system achieving what looks like an optimal solution.
Test case: What will further research show?
If future research shows that the system requires multiple simultaneous conditions to function — specialized spermathecal storage, selective nuclear-mitochondrial pairing, and hybrid-worker integration — this will further strain gradualist explanations. But it will align perfectly with the design expectation: systems work as wholes, not as cobbled parts.
The Lesson:
If cutting-edge science still grapples with low success rates and unknowns, yet ants achieve those outcomes naturally, which framework explains it better?
Footnotes [1] Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Chapter 7, “On Instinct.” Retrieved 9/18/25 from https://www.vliz.be/docs/Zeecijfers/Origin_of_Species.pdf [2] Opening line of the film Stuart Little (1999, dir. Rob Minkoff, Columbia Pictures). [3] Ligers and Tigons and Pizzly’s (Oh my!): hybridizations within a “kind” are not unheard of, but many of them, like mules (donkey and horse), ligers and tigons (lions and tigers, depending on which sex the mother is) have infertile offspring. By contrast the Pizzly bear (Polar and Grizzly) is fertile, and increasingly common. The males produced by cloning in M Ibericus nests breed with the queen who bred them (or a subsequent queen) to continue the line of hybrid workers, even when the closest M. Messor nest is hundreds of miles away. |
Sidebar: The Ants Do It Better
To appreciate how remarkable these ant(ic)s are, consider the state of human science. Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT):
Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy (MRT):
Contrast with ants:
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John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.