Crazy ants’ strange genomes are a biological first

Résumé

Yellow crazy ants get their name from the helter-skelter movements they make after a disturbance. But there’s another reason to call these invasive ants crazy: males of the species are a mixture of two warring cell lineages, researchers report in a study1 published on 6 April in Science. Other creatures sometimes form such chimaeras — usually a developmental accident — but yellow crazy ants are the first known animal for which this property is an essential aspect of life.