McGill Creates Terrifying Super Ants

An evolutionary biologist at the school says this shows that dormant traits can be awoken after millions of years.

First strikes, then riot police, now super-soldier ants. It’s official: terrifying things happen at McGill University. Ehab Abouheif, the university’s Research Chair in Evolutionary Developmental Biology, has created massive soldier ants roughly 2-3 times the size of their peers, with giant heads and mandibles to protect colonies from outside threats. All he had to do was apply a growth hormone to the larvae of various Pheidole ants. Abouheif says the finding shows that dormant genes common to every member of a species can be locked for 30 to 65 million years and re-emerge when the environmental conditions are right. He believes this can be true of humans too, like people with tails and third nipples, and may have significant implications for our current understanding of evolution and various diseases.