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
It was first discovered that these fish reproduce asexually about 100 years ago.
They were the first vertebrate that scientists found to be asexually reproducing.
And so you have these two different lines of thought.
One says, well, the math says that this should not be possible.
But then the other says, well, we're looking at these fish, and it is.
And so how is it that they're doing that?
Are you going to tell me?
Yes.
So what we discovered is that how they're getting around this is they're using a process called gene conversion.
And so gene conversion is a phenomenon that happens in all sorts of cells.
It happens in humans, it happens in other animals.
It's not exclusive to Amazon mollies, but it is a process where
We all have two copies of our genome, right?
One from our mother and one from our father.
And normally you think of these as being fixed within one individual.
And then when you create offspring, they get one copy of each of those from you and one from the other parent.
But in gene conversion, something a little bit different happens.
So you might start out with two different versions of a gene in a certain place, but then gene conversion causes one of these versions to overwrite the other version.
And we've known that this happens in lots of different contexts across the Tree of Life.
And so it's been hypothesized before that maybe this is the secret to how Amazon mollies and other asexual organisms are able to get around Muller's Ratchet.
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