Slashdot Mirror
Cloning In The Animal Kingdom
tanveer1979 writes "The New Scientist is carrying an interesting article
on cloning in nature." From the article: "The ant Wasmannia Auropunctata, which is native to Central and South America but has spread into the US and beyond, has opted for a unique stand-off in the battle of the sexes. Both queens and males reproduce by making genetically identical copies of themselves - so males and females seem to have entirely separate gene pools. Conventional reproduction happens only to produce workers. This is the first instance in the animal kingdom where males reproduce exclusively by cloning, though male honeybees do it occasionally." National Geographic is also carrying the story.
I find it interesting that they speak as though the male ants had an intelligence that decided to modify its genes as described. I tried changing my genes and it didn't help me run faster, jump higher, or gain the ability to remember where I put my keys. Usually, I don't find those bad boys until I change my jeans.
One of my pet peeves is how the media in general consistently screws up binomial nomenclature...it's not Wasmannia Auropunctata - the correct form is Wasmannia auropunctata...the genus name is capitalized, the species name is not...ever! Petty? Maybe...but only if you feel that being correct is not important...non-scientists just don't take the time to understand & then blame scientists for not telling them...so consider yourself told. :)
I remember back in the '80s we used to modify our jeans with a pair of scissors. That didn't help us run faster, jump higher, or gain the ability to remember where we put our keys either. Oh well 2 down, ininitely many more to go.
In a lot of ways I think that the above is true. However, I don't really know if the hive mentality would ever really truly fit for humans though as they tend to show many more tendancies towards the herd or the pack mentality. Once you start thinking of most humans as sheep, the world starts making more sense and starts becoming a lot more depressing. Face it. People just don't want to think about the world and what is going on in it. I know that there are exceptions, but most people do not want the responsibility that comes with knowledge of their world and are much more content sitting in the comfort of their low crime cookie-cutter suburb watching network television than worrying about all hte really terrible things that are happening to people all over the globe.
Hell, if people would just start thinking of how much freaking garbage they produce on a weekly basis and the big fucking hole in the woods that someone dug and lined with plastic to dump it all...oh hell, what's the fucking use?
No wonder people get depressed.
zosxavius photography
Bees are haplo-diploid. That means that females are diploid (2 copies of every chromosome) but males are haploid, forming from unfertilised eggs. So when eggs are fertilised by males, the offspring (workers) end up having 1/2 their mother's DNA but all of their fathers. This means that unlike "normal" sexual reproduction, siblings share 3/4 of their DNA on average, which is more than they could share with their own offspring. So it is in their genes best interest to help produce more siblings than to produce their own offspring.