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The sex lives of scales: scale insects have evolved one bizarre genetic system after another. The author argues that they are caught in a game of cat and mouse with internal, symbiotic bacteria, which has unleashed genetic bedlam
Natural History, Sept, 2004 by Benjamin B. Normark
Geneticists have long wondered how genetic systems involving the deactivation or destruction of the paternal genome could ever have arisen, since the first males to completely lack a paternal genome probably did not survive. But the recent focus on the bacterial genome gives a possible answer to the puzzle. Symbiotic bacteria had both the motive and the opportunity to destroy the paternal genome in males, particularly if they could thereby kill the male. But the destruction of paternal genomes in sons could also be a phenomenon that the females have turned to their own advantage. In most genetic systems, such as the mammalian one, a typical male endows his offspring, on average, with half the genes he received from his mother and half the genes he received from his father. In contrast, a male armored scale or mealybug that manages to survive the depredations of the bacteria is twice as efficient as the typical mammalian male at transmitting his mother's genes. After all, the male scale insect's cells have basically jettisoned the genes the male received from his father. Thus the destruction of the paternal genome may have begun as a means of male-killing by bacteria. But over evolutionary time it may have been co opted by females as a way to spread their own genes at the expense of the genes of their mates.
The ongoing partnership between scale insects and their bacteria is evidently a stormy one. Their conflict and its shifting tactics could well be what drive the dynamic evolution of the scale insects' genetic systems. But no one knows for sure. To find out, new generations of naturalists will need to explore the field, people who are subtle enough to resist the allure of prettier creatures and delve into the deep enigmas that are scale insects.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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