{"id":2007,"date":"2014-06-17T15:41:46","date_gmt":"2014-06-17T20:41:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/?p=2007"},"modified":"2014-11-14T23:38:53","modified_gmt":"2014-11-15T04:38:53","slug":"sex-helps-water-fleas-resist-invasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/sex-helps-water-fleas-resist-invasion\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex helps water fleas resist invasion"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Female<\/a>

Female water fleas (Daphnia pulex) can reproduce without males (asexual reproduction), but some populations produce males anyway. Asexual populations of water fleas were predicted to dominate over sexual ones, but a new study shows that this takes a long time, indicating that there are short-term benefits to sex as well as long-term ones. (Photo credit: Paul Hebert<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n

A long-term study of water fleas – tiny lake-dwelling crustaceans – has shown that there are short-term benefits to sexual reproduction as well as long-term ones.\u00a0<\/span>Most water flea populations only produce females (asexual reproduction) but some produce a mixture of males and females.<\/p>\n

Sex leads to higher genetic diversity, which can help the species adapt to long-term changes, but the fact that asexual populations have more offspring per generation predicts that in the short term, they should outcompete the sexual populations.<\/p>\n

An 18-year study has shown that that isn\u2019t the case, suggesting that other factors, including the proportion of eggs saved for tough times, impacts the competitiveness of the asexual populations.<\/p>\n

Original research paper<\/a><\/span>\u00a0published in the\u00a0Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences<\/span>\u00a0<\/em>on\u00a0June 17, 2014<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Names and affiliations of selected\u00a0authors<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

David Innes<\/a>, Memorial University, Newfoundland<\/span><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A long-term study of water fleas – tiny lake-dwelling crustaceans – has shown that there are short-term benefits to sexual reproduction as well as long-term ones.\u00a0Most water flea populations only produce females (asexual reproduction) but some produce a mixture of males and females. Sex leads to higher genetic diversity, which can help the species adapt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1964,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-paper-of-interest"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Daphnia-pulex.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4DqbN-wn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2007"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2087,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2007\/revisions\/2087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}