Female termites found to clone themselves via asexual reproduction | Hacker News Reader

Female termites found to clone themselves via asexual reproduction

phys.org

42 pointslelf15 comments

This is an excellent format for popular science reporting: the article is followed immediately by an abstract and a link to the original paper. Wow. How long has phys.org been doing this?

If the species is reproducing fully asexually, isn't that an evolutionary dead-end? Sexual reproduction is a huge evolutionary benefit. Many species can do parthenogenesis as a fallback, but if it's the primary form of reproduction then the evolution of the species is hamstrung.

Bacteria beg to differ[1].

1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_%28ecology%29#Bacterial...

Bacteria have methods of exchanging DNA between individuals ("horizontal gene transfer") that termites (presumably) do not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_conjugation

(Also, it's you're just stating a singe data point ("Bacteria have a biomass comparable to plants and animals") it's rather annoying to not actually state it and to instead just give a cite, forcing the reader to click on your link to find out something they could have just read. It's as if I had only said "Bacteria are different than termites" and had given you my link.)

Commentary on style aside, I believe you're incorrect in your presumption. While the parent comment suggests that termites can reproduce fully asexually, the article is unclear about whether or not this is the sole way for new queens to be produced. I believe that even if a queen can ensure all future queens are clones, sexually produced alates can go on to found new colonies.

It is not necessarily an evolutionary dead-end and sexual reproduction is not that huge of a benefit.

> Sexual reproduction is a huge evolutionary benefit.

It's not clear that this is the case. Many bacteria, fungi and plants do not appear to reproduce sexually and are highly successful.

Evolution by natural selection does require that there is variation between individuals, but there is variation even in asexually reproducing species due to mutations and errors in DNA replication.

And I think it might work more favorably for ants anyway due to the nature of the colonies.

For example, with the 'zombie ant fungus', once the colony detects an infection it will remove infected ants or prevent infections from continuing. Ants are remarkably good at clearing their nests of infections.

Naturally this kind of 'communal parasite insulation' would preclude the queen from having to constantly adapt to new threats, and can rely on simpler functions such as mutation to adapt to environmental changes.

And anyway, this asexual reproduction is (purportedly) only for queens. The males+queen still participate in sexual reproduction for workers. In addition, ants send their oldest members out the farthest from the nest, so in reality they're constantly being replenished by new variations.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-zombie-ant-fungus-is-ev...

Parthenogenic species generally have some trick to avoid the otherwise-inevitable effects of co-evolving parasites and sudden environmental changes. Frequently, they are parthenogenic only under some circumstances--there is a parthenogenic species of fresh-water fish that responds to environmental stress by shifting over to sexual reproduction.

Purely parthenogenic species also have genetic tricks to play. There is a purely parthenogenic snake that is triploid (three copies of every chromosome instead of the more usual two) which likely allows it some more "freedom of expression", genetically speaking.

So while you're right that sexual reproduction is a huge evolutionary benefit, parthenogenesis is such a huge benefit to the single parent (it gets 100% of its genes into every offspring instead of a mere half!) that under the right circumstances it will be strongly favoured.

In the case of these termites, its only new queens that are the product of parthenogenesis, and it isn't obvious that this is the only way new queens can be produced, so the typical limits are relaxed.

There are two concepts at work here: Sex, that is, genetic recombination, and reproduction. They serve different roles in ensuring genetic variation and selection of strong genes.

Some species of rotifers have asexual reproduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bdelloidea#Reprodu... . From the article:

> Despite having been asexual for millions of years, they have diversified into more than 450 species and are fairly similar to other sexually reproducing rotifer species.

(More about asexual reproduction in rotifers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotifer#Loss_of_sexual_reproduc... )

Life, uh, finds a way.

Could someone tell me please who first suggested the idea of reproduction without sex?

...your wife?

(bonus points to name the movie)

Rightly down-voted. How dare you have a sense of humor.

Would it be considered cheating making love to your girlfriend's clone?

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