How a Grasshopper species in Australia Gave Up Sex, Took Up Cloning

Amazing stuff! This could be a game changer!

Must be boring, no seduction, no sex for these grasshoppers! (Caution: satire)

Men watch out in the battle of the sexes! 😊

"Around 250,000 years ago, two Australian grasshoppers got lucky. Although the star-crossed hoppers were different species—one a Warramaba whitei and the other a Warramaba flavolineata  ... The duo reproduced and their chromosomes rearranged, hybridizing to form an entirely new and very different grasshopper species that, rather than mating, has been cloning itself through a process called parthenogenesis ever since. ... 

Entirely forgoing sexual reproduction makes the all-female species, called Warramaba virgo, something of an anomaly. ...
And W. virgo has done remarkably well. The grasshopper spread to distant and varied regions of Australia, cloning itself under the radar until 1961, when ... zoologist ... took notice of it after finding its male-free populations. Each individual produces as many offspring as its progenitors, but because all are female, reproductive capacity is doubled. ...
Because W. virgo inhabits such a vast area ... [researcher] was surprised to find that it had stayed so genetically consistent all this time. “We expected to see several different clones, [with] the frequency of clones varying depending on environment,” ...
The results show that parthenogenetic hybrids can fare quite well over long periods of time, the researchers argue in their paper. ...
Genetic and phenotypical analyses found that the asexual species alive today is just as fit as similar, sexual species, including its progenitor species, which are still around as well.  ...
that the lack of deleterious mutations in W. virgo genomes could just mean that the lineages harboring them died, not that they never existed. ..."

I think the perspective got it wrong! I don't think it is whole lineages, but rather individuals die off quickly if they have e.g. deleterious mutations.

From the abstract of the perspective:

"In most animal species [grasshoppers are insects?], only half of the population—the females—invest resources in producing offspring. But some species consist entirely of females that can produce offspring without mating, a process known as parthenogenesis. Parthenogenesis looks like the more efficient system: A parthenogenetic species seemingly ought to out-reproduce and thus outcompete a similar species that reproduces sexually. And yet the overwhelming majority of species are sexual. Why? This counterintuitive trend implies that sexually produced offspring must have some advantage over parthenogenetically produced ones, but what exactly is this advantage? On page 1110 of this issue, Kearney et al. (1) report an exhaustive search for such an advantage in Australian grasshoppers. Their negative result suggests that the advantage may not be something discoverable by studying present-day populations. It may play out on longer time scales, in the patterns of origin and extinction of whole lineages."

From the introduction and abstract:

"It’s the start that counts

Parthenogenetic organisms, those that have females that produce asexually, are relatively rare. The rarity of these organisms has long been attributed to the lack of sex, which facilitates recombination leading to increased variation and, presumably, fitness. Kearney et al. studied a parthenogenetic grasshopper with a hybrid origin and found no decrease in fitness, across many traits, relative to its sexual congeners (see the Perspective by Normark). They conclude that the rarity of this type of asexual reproduction is not due to a lack of fitness but rather to the difficulty of their origin. ...

Abstract

The rarity of parthenogenetic species is typically attributed to the reduced genetic variability that accompanies the absence of sex, yet natural parthenogens can be surprisingly successful. Ecological success is often proposed to derive from hybridization through enhanced genetic diversity from repetitive origins or enhanced phenotypic breadth from heterosis. Here, we tested and rejected both hypotheses in a classic parthenogen, the diploid grasshopper Warramaba virgo. Genetic data revealed a single hybrid mating origin at least 0.25 million years ago, and comparative analyses of 14 physiological and life history traits showed no evidence for altered fitness relative to its sexual progenitors. Our findings imply that the rarity of parthenogenesis is due to constraints on origin rather than to rapid extinction."

How a Grasshopper Gave Up Sex, Took Up Cloning | TS Digest | The Scientist Meet the grasshopper that has reproduced asexually for a quarter of a million years—without acquiring undue numbers of harmful mutations.

Parthenogenesis without costs in a grasshopper with hybrid origins (no public access)

The clones are all right (no public access) Parthenogenetic grasshoppers confound predictions by showing no signs of decline