Cloning In The Animal Kingdom

tanveer1979 writes "The New Scientist is carrying an interesting article on cloning in nature." From the article: "The ant Wasmannia Auropunctata, which is native to Central and South America but has spread into the US and beyond, has opted for a unique stand-off in the battle of the sexes. Both queens and males reproduce by making genetically identical copies of themselves - so males and females seem to have entirely separate gene pools. Conventional reproduction happens only to produce workers. This is the first instance in the animal kingdom where males reproduce exclusively by cloning, though male honeybees do it occasionally." National Geographic is also carrying the story.

small case species

[xipho]

Its Wasmannia aropunctata not "Wasmannia Auropunctata", the species name is never in caps. No chance in hell the editors would catch that though...

Male? Female?

[ManoMarks]

Are these classifications really relevant to this species? I'm always amused by the need of scientists to classify species as male and female. Like the Sea Horse, where the "male" gets pregnant. How meaningful is that?

Re:Obvious first though from certain "parties"

[Anonymous Coward]

is that how they become fire ants?

Re:Male? Female?

[(negative video)]

one has an X chromosone, the other a Y - this can be a pretty significant difference.

Sex determination in ants is by haplodiploidy [wikipedia.org]: females have the full set of double chromosomes, whilst males only have one of each chromosome. The sterile workers get all their father's chromosomes, and half of their mother's chromosomes, which makes them 75% genetically related to each other, and that is what makes altruism evolutionarily favored among workers.

Re:cloning uncommon?

[Doc Ruby]

Fire ants eat napalm. OK, they don't but there isn't enough napalm to get all the ants, though it would destroy the rest of the environment we need to live. The sick fact about bugs is that we need them more than they need us.

asexual reproduction not uncommon in animal kingdo

[krunk4ever]

i'm not sure why cloning in nature comes to us as a surprise at all. all single cellular organisms duplicate themselves (i.e. cloning). we've already known for a long that that many animals in the animal kingdom are known to have asexual reproduction.

from http://biology.about.com/library/weekly/aa090700a. htm [about.com]

In asexual reproduction, one individual produces offspring that are genetically identical to itself. These offspring are produced by mitosis. There are many invertebrates, including sea stars and sea anemones for example, that produce by asexual reproduction.