Many bacterial taxa evolved facultative symbiotic associations with insects and spread through host populations by horizontal and maternal transmission. Co-infection at the individual host level may ...

Lajmi et al. describe a novel supergene associated with social structure in desert ants. Surprisingly, this supergene evolved on an ancient chromosome that also evolved an analogous supergene in fire ...

Hamaguchi, Kinomura and colleagues describe an ant species that lacks workers and males and consists exclusively of queens.

In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

Highlights from News & Views published in 2025.

Coup de pied dans la fourmilière du vivant : une étude conduite à Montpellier montre qu’une même fourmi peut donner naissance à des individus de deux espèces différentes. C’est la xénoparité, qui s’a…

Une nouvelle étude révèle un phénomène inédit dans le règne animal : certaines reines donnent naissance à des mâles d’une autre espèce. Ce mécanisme appelé « xénoparité » permet à leurs colonies de su...

Insect populations have declined worldwide, but the extent and drivers of these declines are debated. Most studies rely on field surveys performed in the past century, leaving gaps in our understandin...

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Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

Phylogenomic analysis of 2524 ultraconserved-element loci from 58 Messor harvester ant species helps in redefining taxonomic groups of the genus. Messor ants emerged in the Irano-Indian area around ...

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Nature - Parasite-ridden ants don’t venture out of the nest, which might help to prolong their lives.

Author summary Current coalescent-based species-delimitation approaches rely on the diagnosis of genetic structure to identify putative taxa. However, when multiple population lineages from the same species are sampled, the conflation of populations with species leads to a proliferation of artifactual “species”, resulting in inaccurate diversity estimates that are challenging systematic studies and fields that rely upon accurately delimited species boundaries. We present here a new approach to delimitation that explicitly models speciation as an extended process, from the formation of new population lineages to the development of independent species. This allows for computational discrimination between genetic structure that corresponds to species lineages versus population lineages within species, transforming species delimitation in both theory and practice in this age of high-resolution genomic data.

Analysis of the smallest known arthropod genome reveals a mechanism for genome reduction that appears to be driven by a specialized ecological interaction with plants.

Abstract. In phylogenetic inference, we commonly use models of substitution which assume that sequence evolution is stationary, reversible, and homogeneous

Nature Ecology & Evolution - Analysis of demographic data from 121 species shows that animal life history strategies vary across two axes of variation defined by the pace of life and the...

Nature - Analyses of insect eggs as well as genetic and life-history traits of insects show that where eggs are laid, rather than universal allometric constants, developmental rate or adult body...

MitoFinder: efficient automated large-scale extraction of mitogenomic data in target enrichment phylogenomics

The parthenogenetic nematode Mesorhabditis belari requires male sperm to activate its eggs but, for the most part, does not use it.

Australian researchers have discovered what is thought to be the world’s oldest recorded spider, unlocking key information about the mysterious eight-legged ...

Nature - A new version of the phylogenetic bootstrap method enables assessment of the robustness of phylogenies that are based on large datasets of hundreds or thousands of taxa.

For the first time, ants have been found farming plants in a mutually dependent relationship. The ants get food and shelter and the plants survive too

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I'm 26 years old and I am always open to new ideas. It's been a fantasy of mine and I figured, better late than never.

A scientist has developed a new method for calculating species divergence, delivering accurate results at 1,000 times the speed of conventional techniques.

A new genetic analysis suggests that the common ancestor of modern mammals may not have been shrewlike in size, but more like a small monkey

Ever since Darwin proposed natural selection as the driving force for the origin of species, the role of adaptive processes in speciation has remained controversial. In particular, a largely unsolved issue is whether key divergent ecological adaptations are associated with speciation events or evolve secondarily within sister species after the split. The plant Arabidopsis halleri is one of the few species able to colonize soils highly enriched in zinc and cadmium. Recent advances in the molecular genetics of adaptation show that the physiology of this derived ecological trait involves copy number expansions of the AhHMA4 gene, for which orthologs are found in single copy in the closely related A. lyrata and the outgroup A. thaliana. To gain insight into the speciation process, we ask whether adaptive molecular changes at this candidate gene were contemporary with important stages of the speciation process. We first inferred the scenario and timescale of speciation by comparing patterns of variation across the genomic backgrounds of A. halleri and A. lyrata. Then, we estimated the timing of the first duplication of AhHMA4 in A. halleri. Our analysis suggests that the historical split between the two species closely coincides with major changes in this molecular target of adaptation in the A. halleri lineage. These results clearly indicate that these changes evolved in A. halleri well before industrial activities fostered the spread of Zn- and Cd-polluted areas, and suggest that adaptive processes related to heavy-metal homeostasis played a major role in the speciation process.