Scientists first found a bee with gynandromorphism, one half of which is male and the other half female. The discovery was made by scientists from Cornell University, Science Alert writes about this.
In nature, animals are most often dimorphic – they have males and females with physiological divisions that allow them to continue to look. However, organisms that are combinations of both sexes, separated by the center of the body, periodically occur.
This condition of the body is called gynandromorphism and occurs as a result of improper distribution of sex chromosomes in cells during the impaired maturation of the egg, its fertilization or fragmentation. Ginandromorphs have already been found in at least 150 species of insects, birds and crustaceans, but they are extremely rare in mammals. In bees, this condition can be detected only after their death.
Scientists discovered the first gynandromorph at Megalopta amoebae, a nocturnal bee that lives in Central and South America. The peculiarity of this discovery is that scientists first found a living gynandromorph bee, in the future this will allow them to study the structure of the work of such an organism.
“This phenomenon [gynandromorphism] can give an idea of the evolution of specialized morphological characters, such as the morphology of the male tribal parasitic bee, as well as new methods of breeding insects”.
Entomologist Erin Krichilsky.
