The Amazon molly and the cloning problem

11:00And there's an interesting reason why it should not have survived as a species. And this is out of University of uh Missouri as well as the Ludwig Maximilian Universität in Munich, Germany. That's the umlaut. So, it's a Universi- Universität. Universität. Yeah. Uh so, you're a good You'll do the German and I'll do the French. >> Yeah, you do the French. Yeah. Um This is a really cool story because this particular fish, it's found in Southern Texas, Northern Mexico. It's called the Amazon molly. And it's named after the Amazonian tribe of legend, which were an all-female tribe, no men, and they had just figured out a way to procreate. This fish, all female,

11:43doesn't actually like have sexual reproduction Oh interesting. >> males. Interesting. >> Yeah. >> Okay. It's fully female. >> Mhm. And it's incredible that it survived for so long because it uses cloning effectively Oh, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all evolutionary theory says that that is a really bad idea. Why? Because when you clone, you don't get genetic variability. And so if there's any kind of change in environment, evolutionary pressure, you're gone. Right. >> Cuz everyone is identical. >> Right. So, the big question has been, this thing is at least 100,000 years old How >> how did it happen? Yeah. So, it formed when there were two fish species, I

12:23believe it was the um Atlantic molly and the sailfin molly. They made it. They produced this hybrid. This hybrid now was a female, and every single Amazon molly today can can be traced back to that single parentage, that single person. Okay? That single fish, I should say. Mhm. Um what's weird about it is that, you know, as I said, they don't sexually reproduce. >> Right. So, they still actually have sex with males, but there's no sperm that is going to fertilize the egg. >> Okay. That sexual process, the act of having sex, starts triggers the special kind of meiosis >> Mhm. in the fish that causes this

13:03cloning to happen. So, you get egg cells