Shared via AddThis
To the horror of every heterosexual male out there, scientists have discovered a species of ant, Mycocepurus smithii, that reproduces without fertilization and the absense of males altogether. Apparently nature has decided that in certain cases, males are just too much of a hassel to have around and need to be "laid" off!
Most social insects—the wasps, ants and bees—are relatively used to daily life without males. Their colonies are well run by swarms of sterile sisters lorded over by an egg-laying queen. But, eventually, all social insect species have the ability to produce a crop of males who go forth in the world to fertilize new queens and propagate.
"Animals that are completely asexual are relatively rare, which makes this is a very interesting ant," says Rabeling, an ecology, evolution and behavior graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. "Asexual species don't mix their genes through recombination, so you expect harmful mutations to accumulate over time and for the species to go extinct more quickly than others. They don't generally persist for very long over evolutionary time."
No comments:
Post a Comment