This morning I caught a pretty interesting article on bdelloid rotifers at the New York Times dot com. I've been a little preoccupied with the concept of asexual reproduction lately, due in part to my recent class and lab in Biology - my first in over a decade. For reasons pertaining to the ever-budding tree of ideas for stories that will probably never get written as well as my usual mental meanderings on the natural world (daydreams), I've been giving the idea some mental face time. I also have Wikipedia and slow shifts at work to thank.
Youtube was also suprisingly fruitful in my search for some good rotifera action:
The idea of asexual reproduction really struck me when I learned that an asexually reproduced animal was actually a clone of its mother (though the more sources I read the more it seems genetic variation does occur somewhat sometimes, though not to the extent that it does in sexual reproduction). What further caught my mind's eye was the fact that some species actually "change" (I'm not sure how - generationally?) from sexual to asexual reproduction depending on the stability of the environment. The idea is that in a stable environment where an organism's evolved characteristics are a good match for the factors it meets there, said organisms will revert to asexual reproduction, in a sort of "if the shoe fits" maneuver. On the flip side, when the environment becomes unstable for any reason, it switches back to the card shuffling game of chance that is sexual reproduction, betting on a good hand to weather the storm. It smacks of Jurassic Park's gender-switching frogs that allowed the Dinosaurs to reproduce on Isla Nublar.
What has struck me in light of all this is the relationship between organism and environment. I've been attempting to ask myself what a perfectly evolved organism might look like and I think I'm having trouble because the answer to this question is relative to the organism's environment, right? Of course I'm thinking of writing a really cool story, so this means my organism's environment will be space, so what does the most perfectly evolved space organism look like? Probably not much unlike the above mentioned rotifers (who do resemble the moster in the movie "The Host", especially in the jaw area). One of the unique aspects of them is their ability to "dry up" when the water is scarce, and literally "blow away", only to reanimate when redessicated. Besides being a pretty huge step in the war against water loss that all but defines the struggle for life, scientists are saying that perhaps this is how the rotifer can pick up some random genes and maintain a slightly higher level of genetic variation than your normal asexually reproducing organism.
This has been another rabbit trail, have a good day.
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