When baby girl cushion scales develop in the mother’s fertilized eggs, excess sperm from the father grows into tissue within her body. This tissue is genetically identical to the father. The “father’s sperms” lives inside the female and fertilize her eggs internally—rendering the female a hermaphrodite and making her father both the grandfather and father of her offspring.
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| Cottony Cushion Scale |
Though this new form of reproduction hasn't replaced cottony cushion scale sex, "this parasitic male has taken off like an epidemic in population," said study leader Andy Gardner, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Oxford.
"Once [this trend] gets started, it's going to sweep through the population so all the females carry it. So there's no point for regular males to exist," Gardner added.
If the females begin passing on the parasitic male to their offspring, there may eventually be no more need for "baby boy" cushion scales that grow up and produce sperm and fertilize females, Gardner said.
This work, published in the August issue of American Naturalist, suggests that the females would benefit from this parasitic infection, negating the need for males.
WOW! That’s pretty interesting. Although I don’t think it will benefit the species in the long term. Sexual reproduction introduces genetic variation in the offsprings. This makes the population better able to keep up with changes in the environment. Asexual reproduction produces a genetically similar population, which may all be easily wiped out by the same disease.
Furthermore, what’s the fun in reproducing if deprived of the joy of the mating process?:D
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| Hermaphroditus, the two-sexed son of Aphrodite and Hermes, was portrayed in Greco-Roman art as a female figure with male genitals. Hermaphroditus is a symbol of bisexuality or effeminacy, |
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