Out in the field, biologists have noted that organisms are more likely to reproduce sexually when there are more parasites loping around in their vicinity.
What has been missing is a direct manipulation to organisms’ sex lives to test if it makes them more or less resistant to parasites.
Direct evidence
Now researchers working at the University of Indiana in the US have used the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans to do just this.
The team engineered two types of worms – some that could only reproduce by having sex, and some that could only clone themselves.
Bacterial cells infect the crushing mouth parts of the worm and kill it
The researchers watched the worms gorge themselves on a lawn of a nasty bacterium, Serratia marcescens, which invades the worms’ guts and from there multiplies into every crevice of their body, killing the worms from the inside.
Across five different populations, worms that reproduced sexually faired well over the 20 generations, while all animals that cloned themselves died quickly.
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