Sexual reproduction is thought to be essential for mixing up genes and holding your own in the race for survival. A major embarrassment to this theory are microscopic animals called rotifers, one ...

Evolutionary biologists at Skoltech have discovered recombination in bdelloid rotifers, microscopic freshwater invertebrates characterized by their presumed ancient asexuality. The existence of such ...

This article is reposted from the old WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I’ll return with fresh material. Sex is, on the whole ...

Staying celibate can be a difficult task, but bdelloid rotifers have managed to survive without sex for nearly 50 million years. Scientists now think they have cracked the secret to these microscopic ...

If sex is so great, how has the bdelloid rotifer been able to do without it for 30 million years? That's a puzzle scientists at Cornell University think they have an answer to. But what is a bdelloid ...

In a paper published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), MBL scientists Irina R. Arkhipova and Matthew Meselson provide evidence that suggests bdelloid ...

You inherited your genes from your parents, half from your father and half from your mother. Almost all other animals contend with the same hand-me-down processes, but not the bdelloid rotifers. This ...

When a class of animal is made up of only one gender, those animals tend to go extinct. That’s not the case with the bdelloid rotifers, which have been exclusively female for around 80 million years.

Six animals alive today routinely endure conditions that would destroy nearly every other complex organism on Earth. Wood ...

Skoltech's evolutionary biologists discovered recombination in bdelloid rotifers, microscopic freshwater invertebrates, which have long been regarded as 'an evolutionary scandal' due to their presumed ...