Asexuality: The Insects that Stick With It
نویسنده
چکیده
One hope of trying to understand why sex is so powerful and prevalent a mode of reproduction relies on the rare examples of animals that persist long-term without having sex. Now, several species of stick insects join that illustrious circle.
منابع مشابه
Molecular Evidence for Ancient Asexuality in Timema Stick Insects
Asexuality is rare in animals in spite of its apparent advantage relative to sexual reproduction, indicating that it must be associated with profound costs [1-9]. One expectation is that reproductive advantages gained by new asexual lineages will be quickly eroded over time [3, 5-7]. Ancient asexual taxa that have evolved and adapted without sex would be "scandalous" exceptions to this rule, bu...
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Transitions from sexual reproduction to parthenogenesis may occur along multiple evolutionary pathways and involve various cytological mechanisms to produce diploid eggs. Here, we investigate routes to parthenogenesis in Timema stick insects, a genus comprising five obligate parthenogens. By combining information from microsatellites and karyotypes with a previously published mitochondrial phyl...
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The extremely slow return movements observed in stick insects (phasmids) after imposed changes in posture are termed catalepsy. In the literature, catalepsy is treated as a behavioural component of the twig mimesis observed in walking stick insects. It is produced by the high gain of the velocity-sensitive component of the relevant joint control systems and by the non-linear dependency of its t...
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Current Biology
دوره 21 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2011