"It is extremely exciting," said Professor Benjamin Oldroyd in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences. "Scientists have been looking for this gene for the last 30 years. Now that we know it's on chromosome 11, we have solved a mystery."
Behavioural geneticist Professor Oldroyd said: "Sex is a weird way to reproduce and yet it is the most common form of reproduction for animals and plants on the planet. It's a major biological mystery why there is so much sex going on and it doesn't make evolutionary sense. Asexuality is a much more efficient way to reproduce, and every now and then we see a species revert to it."
In the Cape honey bee, found in South Africa, the gene has allowed worker bees to lay eggs that only produce females instead of the normal males that other honey bees do. "Males are mostly useless," Professor Oldroyd said. "But Cape workers can become genetically reincarnated as a female queen and that prospect changes everything."
But it also causes problems. "Instead of being a cooperative society, Cape honey bee colonies are riven with conflict because any worker can be genetically reincarnated as the next queen. When a colony loses its queen the workers fight and compete to be the mother of the next queen," Professor Oldroyd said.
[...] Perhaps the most exciting prospect arising from this study is the possibility to understand how the gene actually works functionally. "If we could control a switch that allows animals to reproduce asexually, that would have important applications in agriculture, biotechnology and many other fields," Professor Oldroyd said. For instance, many pest ant species like fire ants are thelytokous, though unfortunately it seems to be a different gene to the one found in Capensis."
Journal Reference:
Boris Yagound, Kathleen A. Dogantzis, Amro Zayed, Julianne Lim, Paul Broekhuyse, Emily J. Remnant, Madeleine Beekman, Michael H. Allsopp, Sarah E. Aamidor, Orly Dim, Gabriele Buchmann, Benjamin P. Oldroyd. A Single Gene Causes Thelytokous Parthenogenesis, the Defining Feature of the Cape Honeybee Apis mellifera capensis. Current Biology, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.04.033
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @07:33PM
If you thought the shitheads on here would let that (p)ass, fugghet about it. If Professor Oldroyd would only solve the problem of Newroyds then there would be no Oldroyds sucking on the govt teat for preious graaaaaaaaaant money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @07:40PM (2 children)
"Males are mostly useless, as women the world over have been saying forever" Professor Oldroyd said.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @07:54PM (1 child)
Then who is going to kill the spiders?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @07:57PM
The butch looking lesbians?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday May 09 2020, @08:08PM (2 children)
I don't know how professor Oldroyd feels about it but there are I guess other aspects involved then just pure reproduction. There is also other social components involved such as bonding, pleasure and fun. Things that are just not there in asexual-reproduction.
So an all female society just didn't magically turn into utopia? Shocking. I guess he just didn't want to come out and say it that the hens need a/some good cock to keep them in line. But he was fine with going that all males are mostly useless, I guess we are not so useless after all.
Yes. Lets turn off reproduction for the undesirables. Nothing will ever go wrong there.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday May 09 2020, @10:03PM
Rather than turning it off, I'm guessing they would like to sprinkle some magic cloning dust onto critically endangered animals to help increase their population, or sell it to Big Ag for $$$.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2020, @09:37AM
Huh what does he mean sex doesn't make evolutionary sense? Isn't sex how you get larger organisms to maintain genetic diversity and the chance to hopefully evolve fast enough to keep up with the smaller organisms or environment changes that might kill them off if they didn't.
The smaller organisms evolve really fast with just asexual reproduction, that's not true for the larger organisms with slower life cycles.
If you're all a bunch of clones you could end up nearly wiped out the next time a strain of fungus/virus/bacteria evolves to use you as its favorite substrate.
Similarly if the air suddenly gets thinner for some reason, not all of us will die - millions of humans will still survive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_adaptation_in_humans [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @08:17PM (3 children)
(Sorry someone had to say it)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @01:35AM (2 children)
Thing about parthenogenesis, Same sex all the way. Only females, like Jurassic Park. So Jesus is either a miracle, or a transgender savior.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday May 10 2020, @03:51PM (1 child)
The H in "Jesus H. Christ!" stands for haploid :D
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday May 11 2020, @12:49AM
Wasn't she female? I thought that male bees were haploid.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Saturday May 09 2020, @10:09PM (6 children)
No it's not a mystery, it turned out to be the most successful method of survival for billions of years. Most other methods of reproduction that may have been tried in the past, obviously didn't make it. All that sex happens because the individuals that didn't have that drive, didn't reproduce. We've become good at it after countless generations, but even now there are individuals who will not reproduce, for whatever reason. And there will probably always be, as long as this planet sustains life.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday May 10 2020, @01:02AM
We don't want to reproduce because the Jews have manipulated economy and society such that it isn't viable unless you are very rich or very stupid, Mexicans are a good example of that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday May 10 2020, @03:23PM (4 children)
Sorry, but it *is* a mystery. Yes, it's the most successful approach (except for special cases like the bdelloid rotifers), but the question is "Why?". Nobody has been able to provide a convincing theory. The "parasite arms race" has something going for it, but it doesn't give enough of an advantage. But species that turn parthenogenetic tend to go extinct rapidly...except for the bdelloid rotifers. Nobody knows why they are an exception. Nobody knows why the other species are less likely to go extinct (without descendant species). There are lots of theories, but even added together they don't seem sufficient to explain what is seen.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday May 10 2020, @10:29PM (3 children)
Are you serious? By having each parent contribute half of the genes, you're increasing the number of genetic variations by the cross product of the number of variations in chromosomes. It's a huge boost to evolution/natural selection/adaptation.
Say the rate of mutation is 1 per year. For an asexual species, the rate of new genetic variations is 1 per year. For a sexual species that has 1000 different chromosome variations, that rate is now 1000 for the first year.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday May 10 2020, @11:08PM (2 children)
Yes, I'm serious. You've got to remember that most mutations are maladaptive, and count the other costs. That is can work is proven by the bdelloid rotifers. But why isn't it most common? Why do most species that adopt it go extinct without descendants? And why doesn't it work that way for the bdelloid rotifers?
It's a question with a lot of barbs to it, and the answer is not obvious.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday May 11 2020, @12:51AM (1 child)
Asexual species have difficulty in combining beneficial mutations.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 11 2020, @02:55AM
They don't combine them, but they do preserve them against neutral drift. And if each individual averages several descendants (whether or not they get eaten) then there is selection pressure. Sexual combination is quite likely to lose selective advantages during mitosis.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 10 2020, @01:07AM (1 child)
Entomophiles in prisons around the world are filing appeals. "I TOLD you I didn't have sex with that little queen! She got pregnant all by herself!"
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @01:36AM
Oh, noes! Runaway has been hitting the thesaurus, again!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @05:47PM
so are these bees being boned by an alien like jesus' mom?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2020, @11:39PM
Bear in mind that the capensis honeybee is capable of messing up the hives of regular african honeybees because of ... well, it's complex, but they can confuse a hive to the point that it doesn't feed itself adequately, and a hive then pretty much drops out.
For people who care about things like hive dynamics and collapse and so on, it's pretty important to understand this stuff.