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Algae with three sexes that mate in pairs identified in Japanese river (2021)
- mPReDiToR 5y agoPiers Anthony, Cluster series, Spicans. Some people say fact is stranger than fiction, but art and life have such parallels.
- ctoth 5y agoI was just thinking about this series the other day and am pleasantly surprised to run across someone else who has read it.
- hombre_fatal 5y agoHeh, I was just thinking about the Xanth and Cluster series and how I don't hear about them much these days. I devoured Piers Anthony's books in my teens.
- aaaaarghZombies 5y agoThere's also fungi with a fuck ton of genders, excuse the pun.
- rbanffy 5y agoSchizophyllum commune, putting the "fun" in "fungi".
- klodolph 5y agoSchizophyllum commune, known as the splitgill mushroom, has over 23,000 sexes. Two individuals are sexually compatible based on genes at two sites in their genome. If a pair has matching genes at either location, the pair is not sexually compatible.
- mywacaday 5y agoIs there any possibility that humans could be similar given that not every couple can have children naturally?
- sharpneli 5y agoThere is a massive difference. With that kind of mushroom one can expect that any random pair is very likely to match up. With humans you have tad less of 50% chance of being able to make kids with any random otherwise fertile human.
- openfuture 5y agoErr, that is an uncharitable reading of GP imo. If you pair males and females (rather than just "humans") then the anology holds quite well no?
- sequoia 5y agoI think the topic is getting a bit muddled here. Are we talking about couples who can't have children because one or the other is infertile/sterile, or couples who could have children with someone else but not one another? I'm not familiar with this latter scenario. A man being sterile is nothing like this algae's situation, as it has nothing to do with "pairing," he's simply unable to produce children with anyone.
- InitialLastName 5y agoHow often is the inability to have children naturally dependent on direct compatibility, rather than the ability of one or both partners to have children at all, regardless of partner?
- chrisdave 5y agoThis is an interesting idea because it seems like it could be true and we've just never noticed. I'm not sure how you'd go about designing a study but I guess it would be easy to find volunteers.
- b3lvedere 5y ago"each sex can enter fertile pairings with 22,960 others" Imagine its Tinder profile :)
- Jenk 5y agoI can't get past the mental visualisation of the gender drop-down list on the registration. Or the "seeking" list.
- xattt 5y agoA list would only work if selection is limited. A better UI decision would either be a “sex cloud” akin to a word cloud, or the bubble UI that Apple Music uses to identify your preferred genres.
- Jenk 5y agoTo be a success you'd need to create some kind of yubikey specifically for DNA sequences. Hell I'd imagine you'd need something like that just to meet people at a bar.
- rbanffy 5y agoIn the late 90's I designed a dating website and we had about 5 axis to have categories for morphology, preferences, compatibility, etc. Sadly, I didn't stay long enough to see it deployed to production, and never actually used the application (Amigos Virtuais, at Universo Online, in Brazil). The PO and I had a lot of fun with all other personality dimensions that we had.
- dfxm12 5y agoTinder is not necessarily about "fertile pairings" though, but I guess humans (and some monkeys) are pretty unique in nature in that regard :)
- willcipriano 5y agoIt's almost entirely about secondary sex characteristics and those exist exclusively to find fertile mates. Gay people still look at their potential partners secondary sex characteristics when deciding to mate with them. It's sort of a distinction without a difference situation.
- nephrite 5y agoSo those aren't a third sex, it's individuals with both male and female reproductive cells.
- smrk007 5y agoBut they're calling it a third sex because it's due to "normal expression of the species' genes", not because of hermaphroditism.
- empthought 5y agoIt is a third (or fourth) phenotype, not a third sex. The abstract of the source article is careful to spell this out; the clickbait site introduced the error. "Three sex phenotypes in a haploid algal species give insights into the evolutionary transition to a self‐compatible mating system." -- i.e. how might self-pollinating plants have developed?
- dymk 5y agoSounds like a third sex
- chiefalchemist 5y agoI think it depends on how you define sex, or perhaps even gender would be more accurate? In any case, I think what's being proposed is there are still on 2 unique sexes. - some of the species have one - some of the species have the other - some have the ability of both. Technically, yes, that's still only two.
- nkrisc 5y agoHow do you define sex? Because what you just described sure sounds like a third sex to me. Your description is premised on the assumption that there are only two sexes to begin with, and define the third sex in terms of the two sexes you assume to be the only ones that exist. Instead you could describe them as sexes A, B, and C where any of following pairings are valid for reproducing: A and B, A and C, B and C, or C and C.
- rsynnott 5y agoFor a very different, but interesting, example, see these sparrows, which kind of have four sexes: https://www.nature.com/articles/539482a https://www.nature.com/articles/539482a
- empthought 5y agoThat is not four sexes at all. That is a potential speciation event and "weird sex chromosomes." There is still a large gamete and a small gamete and no other type of sex cell involved. Two sexes. It's actually pretty sad that this (non-peer reviewed, layperson-written) article got published as-is in Nature. Tetrahymena thermophila has no sexes; it is isogamous. Chromosome configurations are not sexes. But I guess the point of the article is the human interest story, not the subject of the title.
- loudtieblahblah 5y ago
- awglkjl34kj 5y ago
- empthought 5y agoThis article does not describe a species with three sexes. It describes a species with two sexes that can co-exist (or not) in the same individual organism. It's somewhat unique because of the "(or not)" — most anisogamous species have either two phenotypes that produce one and only one of the gametes, or a single phenotype that produces both (like many flowering plants). Still only two sexes, though—just more than two phenotypes.