Submission + - Asexual Amazonian Ants Reproduce By Cloning (royalsocietypublishing.org) 1
__aarvde6843 writes: An interesting article in the magazine Proceedings of the Royal Society (B) about a species of Ants from Amazon that are all female and clones of the queen:
"Asexual reproduction imposes evolutionary handicaps on asexual species, rendering them prone to extinction, because asexual reproduction generates novel genotypes and purges deleterious mutations at lower rates than sexual reproduction. Here, we report the first case of complete asexuality in ants, the fungus-growing ant Mycocepurus smithii, where queens reproduce asexually but workers are sterile, which is doubly enigmatic because the clonal colonies of M. smithii also depend on clonal fungi for food."