All-female fish class shows sex is overrated

An all-female freshwater fish species called a Amazon molly that inhabits rivers and creeks along a Texas-Mexico limit is vital explanation that sexual reproduction might be vastly overrated.

Scientists pronounced on Monday they have deciphered a genome of the Amazon molly, one of a few vertebrate class to rest upon asexual reproduction, and detected that it had nothing of the genetic flaws, such as an accumulation of damaging mutations or a lack of genetic diversity, they had expected.

They found that a Amazon molly, named after a fierce female warriors of ancient Greek mythology, boasts a hardy 
genetic makeup that creates it equally fit, or even some-more so, than fish regulating passionate facsimile in that both maternal and paternal genes are upheld along to offspring.

“The Amazon molly is doing utterly well,” pronounced biologist Manfred Schartl of a University of Wuerzburg in Germany. 
“Unexpectedly, we did not find a signs of genomic spoil as predicted.”

Sperm stealer

The fish reproduces regulating a plan in that a female’s egg cell develops into a baby though being fertilized by a male’s sperm cell. But that does not meant a fish does not need some hanky panky.
 
“The Amazon molly womanlike produces clones of itself by duping a masculine of a closely associated class to partner with her. The asexual mode of facsimile termed gynogenesis requires the female to partner with a masculine though nothing of a male’s genome is passed to a offspring,” pronounced geneticist Wesley Warren of the McDonnell Genome Institute during Washington University in St. Louis.
 
The Amazon molly’s egg cells are activated to rise into an bud by a spermatazoa dungeon that degenerates though fusing with the egg’s nucleus.
 
The fish is adult to about 3 inches (8 cm) prolonged and eats insects, plants, algae and other food. The investigate showed it originated when dual other species, a Atlantic molly and the Sailfin molly, corresponding about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
 
Animals that imitate asexually are singular compared to the overwhelming infancy that exist as males and females and 
imitate sexually.

“It was prolonged suspicion that vertebrates would not be means to exist in such a way. It was a prodigy when a Amazon molly was a initial chaste vertebrate detected in 1932,” Schartl said.
 
About 50 vertebrates are famous to use chaste reproduction including fish, amphibians and reptiles.
 
The investigate was published in a biography Nature Ecology  Evolution. 

Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/amazon-molly-1.4532971?cmp=rss