A gynandromorph with a female half on the left and male half on the right found in our laboratory colony of Wasmannia auropunctata. Photo by Hugo Darras.

The male part

A cute Little Fire Ant queen pupae and a worker (also cute) of from our lab colonies ^ ^

New paper out w/ Shu-Ping (Sue) Tseng Scotty Yang Keller Lab and & colleagues. We show that the widespread longhorn crazy ant is likely native to the Indian subcontinent and that queens and males worldwide belong to two separate clonal lineages.🐜 doi.org/10.1111/mec.16…

It's with great pleasure to introduce you Hugo Darras as new PI in our Research Group! Hugo works on the evolution of reproductive systems in social insects. Welcome aboard Universität Mainz! 👏👏👏

Back to France! After 15 years following ants in Lausanne, New York and Mainz, they finally led me to IRBI, which I have newly joined as a CNRS 🌍 researcher. Excited to keep on studying the evolution and functioning of insect societies!

The group had a Sichuan dinner to celebrate the arrival of the Chinese New Year 🎉. We wish everyone a happy new year of 🐇🐇 🐇 🐇 🐇.

Congrats Eléonore Genzoni !!

New preprint from the lab, in which nematodes related to C. elegans ambush ants, infect their head, and change their behavior. tinyurl.com/yckek3fu. Lead by Zimai Li 荔枝麦, with Erik Frank, T. Schmitt, Arilab, F. Azuma, Darren J. Parker, T. Oliveira-Honorato, V. Bachmann

Congrat Katja!!! We are all happy to see this work out !!!

New paper out in Science Magazine We report an extraordinary reproductive system in the yellow crazy ant. 🐜 Males of this species are all chimeras: they carry maternal and paternal genomes in different cells of their body. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Ants never cease to amaze. The latest and craziest in the saga of ant reproductive systems by Hugo Darras and Keller Lab: males in the yellow crazy ant are chimeras of two distinct genetic lineages:

New publication "Social isolation shortens lifespan through oxidative stress in ants" out today in Nature Communications! nature.com/articles/s4146…

New paper on wound care in ants! Here we show that nestmates treat infected wounds more than sterile ones and that they use a battery of antimicrobial compounds to do so! This was a massive interdisciplinary project so let me tease it apart: (1/9) rdcu.be/duJDN

🐝 New preprint on the link between the gut microbiota, behavior and physiology in honeybees! 🧠🍯 biorxiv.org/content/10.110… Follow the 🧵…

Greenbeard effects in plants.

New publication led by Sean McGregor 🐜 Targeted worker removal reveals a lack of flexibility in brood transport specialisation with no compensatory gain in efficiency: nature.com/articles/s4159…

🤩Excited to share our new paper in Science Advances 🐜 ! We describe a new molecular mechanism underlying complementary sex determination in the Argentine ant 🐜, involving a long non-coding RNA that we named ANTSR :) 🐜 science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

“Wound-dependent leg amputations to combat infections in an ant society” Erik Frank, Keller Lab Learn more in Current Biology: cell.com/current-biolog…