• Bees win in survival wars

    From ScienceDaily@1:317/3 to All on Tue Apr 5 22:30:38 2022
    Bees win in survival wars
    Hosts and parasites in evolutionary battle over millions of years

    Date:
    April 5, 2022
    Source:
    Flinders University
    Summary:
    Like diseases affecting humans, parasites can wage a deadly
    evolutionary 'arms race' against their hosts. But can hosts and
    parasites upgrade their weapons at the same rate?


    FULL STORY ==========================================================================
    Like diseases affecting humans, parasites can wage a deadly evolutionary
    "arms race" against their hosts. But can hosts and parasites upgrade
    their weapons at the same rate?

    ==========================================================================
    This can be a very unequal battle for two reasons. If the parasite is
    too successful it will wipe out its host, and therefore lose its only
    means of surviving. At the same time, evolutionary "wars" between hosts
    and their parasites depend on their rates of evolution; we can think of
    that as their ability to 'upgrade their weapons'.

    Flinders University researchers examined this conundrum by examining a
    social bee (Exoneura) and its social parasite, another bee (Inquilina).

    "These parasitic species spend their entire life cycle within the nest
    of the host species and have extreme adaptations to social parasitism,
    they are not able to survive without their hosts," says first author Dr
    Nahid Shokri- Bousjein in an article in Ecology and Evolution.

    The ability of species to adapt to existential challenges depends on
    their ability to 'discover' new strategies via random mutations. The more individuals in a species, the greater the likelihood that a favorable
    mutation will arise amongst one of them, and that means that species
    with larger populations should generally win any "wars" against their
    enemies. So what happens when species and their parasites or pathogens
    have very different population sizes? "We can see this problem play
    out with COVID-19. The virus has a much bigger population size than its
    host (us!), so its ability to evolve around our defenses is great,"
    says Dr Shokri-Bousjein. "We see this in terms of new COVID variants
    emerging and then spreading." But what happens when the pathogen has
    very small population sizes? "In our previous studies, we found that the population sizes of the parasite species are an order of magnitude lower
    than their host. Surprisingly, our analyses of molecular data showed that
    rates of evolution were similar between host and parasite." Flinders University Associate Professor Mike Schwarz says that "evolutionary
    wars between species and their enemies may be much more complex than
    we have thought. Large population sizes might allow more strategies to
    arise, but maybe the critical issue is how effective those strategies
    are. Species like these bee social parasites are on the very edge of
    survival: they might tell us something about how you can survive when
    your very existence is under threat.

    There might be some lessons we can learn from these bees as we deal with
    the covid-19 pandemic."

    ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Flinders_University. Note: Content
    may be edited for style and length.


    ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
    1. Nahid Shokri Bousjein, Simon M. Tierney, Michael G. Gardner,
    Michael P.

    Schwarz. Does effective population size affect rates of molecular
    evolution: Mitochondrial data for host/parasite species pairs
    in bees suggests not. Ecology and Evolution, 2022; 12 (2) DOI:
    10.1002/ece3.8562 ==========================================================================

    Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220405092731.htm

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