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Interesting. To biologists, anyway.
Jun. 30th, 2005 03:02 pmTrying to check on an item in the Grauniad on the subject, I found this in Nature:
In a bizarre war of the sexes, little fire ants have evolved a novel way to fight for their gender's genes, according to new research.
The sperm of the male ant appears to be able to destroy the female DNA within a fertilized egg, giving birth to a male that is a clone of its father. Meanwhile the female queens make clones of themselves to carry on the royal female line.
The result is that both the males and females have their own, independent gene pools, leading some to speculate whether each gender ought to be technically classified as its own species. "We could think of the males as a separate, parasitic species that uses host eggs for its own reproduction," says Denis Fournier of the Université Libre in Brussels, Belgium, who led the work.
The page is here, but I think you may need a sub to see it. Any way up, that's the weirdest thing I've seen for a while. The implications make my head hurt.
In a bizarre war of the sexes, little fire ants have evolved a novel way to fight for their gender's genes, according to new research.
The sperm of the male ant appears to be able to destroy the female DNA within a fertilized egg, giving birth to a male that is a clone of its father. Meanwhile the female queens make clones of themselves to carry on the royal female line.
The result is that both the males and females have their own, independent gene pools, leading some to speculate whether each gender ought to be technically classified as its own species. "We could think of the males as a separate, parasitic species that uses host eggs for its own reproduction," says Denis Fournier of the Université Libre in Brussels, Belgium, who led the work.
The page is here, but I think you may need a sub to see it. Any way up, that's the weirdest thing I've seen for a while. The implications make my head hurt.
