Posted by Zooillogix is finally living up to the ‘x’ in our namesake. We have discovered a microscopic animal that engages in lesbian sex with its dead female friends in order to obtain DNA and thus survive to reproduce.
Bdelloid rotifers are tiny creatures that live in moss and small pools of water. Every single bdelloid is a female, and they reproduce exculsively by cloning themselves. When their watery habitats dry up, however, so do they, where they remain for days, months, even years in form of dehydrated stasis until the water returns.
This is my friend, Shari. She just came over to use the shower.
The drying up process leaves the bdelloids with no metobolic activity and causes their cells to rupture and their DNA to fragment. For almost any other creature in this world, this would spell disaster. The bdelloids, though, have a way of reconstructing themselves: They take in fragments of DNA that float around them in the water, whether they come from plants, fungi or even other dead female bdelloids (hence the necrophilial lesbian sex with other bdelloids.) Though it is not nearly as spicy as the title of this piece suggests, labeling bdelloids as lesbian necrophiliacs is extremely useful when trying to get someone to read an article that you wrote on the topic whether it’s here on Zooillogix, Discover Magazine or in the nature journal Science.
NVDH does it again…
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