Mean ol' acids, actually
To be false, it must be some sort of conspiracy, right?
Abstinence may have found its most impressive poster child yet:
Diploscapter pachys. The tiny worm is transparent, smaller than a poppy seed and hasn't had sex in 18 million years.
It's basically just been cloning itself this whole time. Usually, that's a solid strategy for going extinct, fast. What's its secret?
"Scientists have been trying to understand how some animals can survive for millions of years without sex, because such strict, long-term abstinence is very rare in the animal world," says
David Fitch, a biologist at New York University. Most plants and animals use sex to reproduce.
As he and his colleagues
report in the recent issue of
Current Biology, this seemingly unimpressive roundworm seems to have developed a different way of copying its genes — one that leads to just enough mutations to give the worms room to adapt, but not enough to cause crippling defects.
Tiny, Transparent Worm Challenges Notions About Sex
