Aug 06 2009
Parasites and Barry White
How’s this for a science-news-release title to make your brain go, “Huh?”:
Parasites keep things sexy in ‘hotspots’
Apparently, parasites can put organisms in the mood for orgasms. Well, if not for orgasms, at least for sexual reproduction. How so?
First things first. It has long puzzled biologists why some creatures bother with sexual reproduction. It is very inefficient next to the asexual variety. Why not just clone great numbers of yourself?
The answer may reside in the “Red Queen hypothesis” -
[W]hich says that coevolving parasites reduce the reproductive advantage of asexual reproduction by adapting to infect clonal individuals after they become locally common.
While sexual reproduction may be less efficient, it produces offspring with more diverse genes and gene-combinations. It is then less likely a parasite can wreck havoc on the whole population of one’s progeny.
Here’s the fascinating nitty-gritty of new research into the matter:
The team exposed snails taken from shallow and deep habitats in two lakes to parasites derived from those lakes or one other. In theory, King explained, if parasites and snails are coevolving, then they should be more infective to same-lake snails than different-lake snails. And that’s exactly what they found but on an even smaller scale: parasites from the same lake were significantly more infective to shallow-water snails than to deep-water snails, they show. Thus, it appears that snails living in deep water are completely removed from the coevolutionary interactions taking place in the shallows.
Cool! Precise data with profound implications. Oh baby, baby, Barry White may not have sung about parasites, but his singing may have likewise “inspired” copulatory behavior.
