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Shenyang Agricultural University researchers noticed that in the wild, Encarsiaformosa wasps almost never produced males.
In the laboratory, however, they found that if the female wasp was treated with tetracycline, an antibiotic, almost 70% of the progeny were male
A paper in the journal Current Biology showed that Wolbachia bacteria had manipulated the wasp Encarsia formosa to entirely get rid of its males
Wolbachia bacteria
Wolbachia is a genus of gram-negative bacteria that can either infect many species of arthropod as an intracellular parasite, or act as a mutualistic microbe in filarial nematodes
It is one of the most common parasitic microbes of arthropods, and is possibly the most common reproductive parasite in the biosphere.
Its interactions with its hosts are often complex.
Some host species cannot reproduce, or even survive, without Wolbachia colonisation
Wolbachia bacteria were shown to be smart enough to double the chromosome number in their host’s unfertilised eggs and to supply them with ‘tra gene’
In Wasps, Wolbachia bacteria can induce unfertilised eggs to somehow double the chromosome number and enable development of female wasps.
It is not known how the bacteria do this, but this renders males superfluous
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