Sascha is a U.K.-based trainee staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe. Besides writing, she enjoys playing tennis, bread-making and browsing second-hand shops for hidden gems.
About a decade ago, scientists observing clonal raider ants spotted something strange: Although the species is known to be queenless, a few ants were posing as queens of the colony, lording over their hardworking counterparts. These wannabe queens had wing stubs, as well as giant eyes and ovaries.
"This was a shocking discovery," Waring"Buck" Trible , an entomologist, John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow and the lead author of the study in which the findings were published, told Live Science in an email."The clonal raider ant is a queenless ant species, and no winged female adults have been observed in this species previously."
This single mutation may be the switch that turned clonal raider ants from the"wild type" usually found in nature into a mutant variant of the same species. "What we describe here is a mutant strain that is extremely closely related to its wild type ancestors. So it's not really a different species, but maybe what could be considered an intermediate form," Kronauer added.
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