Comics, workshops, and asexual sex.

Want to draw with me?

Goodest Good Friday, my angels.

I swan-dived into the day by interviewing scientist Veronika Laine who *gasp* suggested in a 2021 paper that bdelloid rotifers (those icons of asexual females-only reproduction from a few newsletters ago (and correction: it’s 30 million, not 80 million, years of asexual reproduction- I got ahead of myself/carried away with concepts of feminist resistance to evolutionary theory)) might be reproducing SEXUALLY after all. Importantly, no male bdelloid rotifers hath ever been spotted- ok, yes, a guy 100 years ago on a frozen lake in Denmark was like, I believe I saw a couple, but I can’t provide evidence. But we’ve seen none before (possibly during) or since. And lemme tell ya- the scientists have been LOOKIN. Veronika pointed me to new research that indicates the evidence of meiosis- the recombination of DNA with genes from two biological parents- in bdelloid genomes is, in fact, bdelloid rotifer females being able to undergo incomplete meiosis that looks nearly identical to the real thing- all on their own. So there’s still a slight possibility of males, but the deeper we go, the more ferociously, inventively, asexually genomically independent these gals appear to get.