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Published online 9 April 2008 | Nature 452, 678-680 (2008) | doi:10.1038/452678a
News Feature
Evolution: Scandal! Sex-starved and still surviving
Some creatures have what it takes to survive long dry spells. How they do this may be revealed in their genes, reports Erika Check Hayden.
In the sleepy, tourist town of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, David Mark Welch is looking for a sex scandal, and he knows just where to find it.
He scrapes a small chunk of bark from a locust tree, drops it in a vial and returns to his laboratory in the imposing, red-brick Lillie building at the Marine Biology Laboratory, or MBL, as it is usually known.
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My comment is about the "darwinulids exposed" box linked to this news feature. Aspects of Myles Allen's commentary (Nature Geoscience, 1, 209) about Internet bloggers and responsible scientific journalism chimed in with my own recent experience. I was privileged to be a co-author, with Robin Smith and Takahiro Kamiya, of a paper recording their discovery of hitherto-unknown males of "ancient asexual" darwinulid ostracods (Proc. R. Soc. Lond. ser. B 273, 1569-1578; 2006). In 2007, at a meeting on sex and parthenogenesis, I heard a speaker dismiss claims of darwinulid asexuality because ?males have been found?, sidelining a decade of work on darwinulid reproduction. I spoke up: as an author of the cited paper, I said, I would be delighted to be able to announce that we had proved others wrong, but I could not because the discovery of rare males did nothing of the sort. The males may be atavistic and functionless; despite diligent searching only three have been found among thousands of females. The males provide valuable morphological data to inform phylogenetic studies; they do not refute the substantial molecular evidence (Proc. R. Soc. Lond. ser. B 270, 827?833; 2003) that darwinulids are an exceptionally long-lived lineage of obligate parthenogens, although they call into question some criteria used to claim, from the fossil record, that they have been asexual for 200 million years (Proc. R. Soc. Lond. ser. B 270, 723?729; 2003). In December 2007 I agreed to a telephone interview with a scientific journalist preparing an article on "ancient asexual" bdelloid rotifers, who wanted to include the darwinulid ostracod story; afterwards I supplied contact details for my co-authors on the "males" paper. When the article appeared in April 2008 I was taken aback to find, under the headline "Darwinulids exposed!!", my co-authors quoted as stating that there was now little support for darwinulids as ancient asexuals; my own comments, which would have balanced the article, went unmentioned. I do not object to them expressing such a view, although you will not find it stated so boldly in the original paper; what worries me is the use of selective (one might even call it sensationalist) journalism to present a biased report, undermining one research group in favour of another. It seems that it is not just the Internet that can plough up a level playing field; the news feature to which I refer was written by Erika Check Hayden and was published in Nature (452, 678-680; 2008).
Thank you for your comment, Dr. Horne. We at Nature stand behind the reporting, which indicates clearly that the asexuality of darwinulids is not a closed question. -Brendan Maher Features Editor