How many sexes are there? Two, right? Not if you’re a clam shrimp – then there are three, while other organisms have hundreds or even thousands of ‘mating types’. Such weird mating strategies evolve by chance, but can result in better odds of finding a match.
YOUR PLACE OR SLIME?
Physarum polycephalum, a common slime mould that lives on decaying leaves, spends most of its time clumped together. It’s basically a slimy, yellow bag, full of thousands of DNA-containing nuclei, that can crawl across a surface. The slime mould releases spores that become sex cells. In order to mate, two spores must meet and merge sex cells, which have different sexes or ‘mating types’ depending on which variants of certain genes they carry. Estimates of its number of mating types range from 13 to over 500.
THREE IS THE MAGIC NUMBER
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TAKE IT SLOW
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