Detailed genetic analyses of little fire ant
Denis Fournier, from Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, and colleagues studied the DNA of queens, workers, males, and their sperm from 34 little ant nests in French Guiana. They expected to find a typical haplodiploidy genetic system, but instead discovered that queens possessed only maternally derived DNA, and males possessed only paternally derived DNA.
"If males are potentially in an evolutionary dead end, as is true in the little fire ant where workers are sterile and all queens are clonally produced, they do...