Saturday, June 18, 2011

Time-travel sex: Bad for sea monkeys

Emma Mustich writes for Salon:

For a new study set to be published in the journal Evolution, scientists from the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier, France, mated female brine shrimp ("sea monkeys") with males from past and future generations.

The report, called "Male-Female Coevolution in the Wild: Evidence from a Time Series in Artemia Franciscana," found that the female brine shrimp "survived better and had longer interbrood intervals when mated with their contemporary males compared to when mated with males from the future or the past." Its formal conclusion: "[T]he process of male-female coevolution, previously revealed by experimental evolution in laboratory artificial conditions, can occur in nature on a short evolutionary time scale."

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