Stay tuned!! More will come soon about the intricate and complicated life cycle of Daphnia 🤭!!!!

Even at very low frequency, rare sex can reduce the long-term costs of asexuality while avoiding most costs of sex. Our results reveal a previously unknown reproductive pathway in Daphnia and suggest that cryptic sex may be more common than previously thought.

1,268 and 636 males were regularly added over ~2-3 months. We collected embryos from diapause eggs, extracted DNA, and tested for paternal alleles. A few embryos carried genetic material from the males, showing that sexual reproduction had occurred, even though most reproduction remained asexual.

Females from obligate asexual lineages were allowed to reproduce clonally in large buckets, using genotypes that cannot produce males. We then carried out 2 independent experiments, each involving a different lineage of asexual females and a different lineage of sexual males.

We brought together sexual lineages (left part, produce diapause eggs after fertilization by males), and obligate parthenogenetic lineages (right part 'asexual', produce these eggs asexually).