Ed Ricemeyer
speaker
141 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Ed Ricemeyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So these two different species of fish, they're somewhat related, they're in the same genus, so it's not like a cat and a dog or something, but they're somewhat related but not super related.
They mated and they created an offspring.
And these two species have mated and created offspring plenty of times before that and after that.
But what normally happens when two species mate and create an offspring is either they can reproduce just fine or they can't reproduce at all.
And I think good examples of this for being able to reproduce just fine, you can think of modern humans and Neanderthals.
where these were two different populations that were able to admix such that today, many tens of thousands of years later, we mostly do still have Neanderthal ancestry from those hybridization events.
Whereas an example of a hybridization that didn't work out so well would be a mule, which is a cross of a donkey and a horse.
And a mule is not able to reproduce at all.
It's a dead end as far as evolution goes.
But the third possibility, and this is what happened with Amazon molly, and this is very rare, is that it was able to still reproduce, but one small part of its reproductive process was broken.
And this is the part where it is able to divide
its genes into two different pieces so that you end up with two half copies of the genome in each egg that then get fertilized by sperm so that you end up with new organisms that are half the mother's genome and half the father's genome.
He lost that ability but retained everything else.
So that is the big question that motivated our research into this topic.
Because for about 100 years, it's been kind of generally accepted that if you look at the math, if you do the calculations,
It shouldn't work.
You shouldn't be able to be asexual and only asexual for long periods of time.
But these fish have been reproducing asexually exclusively for at least 100,000 years.
That's what the genes tell us.
And so it's this big question where we've known about these fish as scientists.
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