Researchers have uncovered an unusual survival strategy in Iberian harvester ants that turns basic biology on its head: The queens can produce eggs that develop into two different ant species. A team ...

The research was published in the journal Nature earlier this month. It was carried out by a team of international scientists based at different institutes in France, Italy, Bulgaria, and Austria.

This process—the team dubs it “xenoparous,” meaning that an organism gives birth to another species as part of its life cycle—is a “natural case of cross-species cloning, resulting in the maintenance ...