A study reveals that sexual parasitism helps deep-sea anglerfish adapt to dark, vast ocean depths, with potential insights for medical research on immune suppression. Credit: SciTechDaily.com
Understanding the evolution of sexual parasitism has implications that could one day inform advances in medicine, according to the researchers. “People tend to have single-trait explanations for why a group of animals can thrive in a given ecosystem, but in most living things, it seems that several distinctive innovations work synergistically to exploit new habitats,” said Chase D. Brownstein, a graduate student in Yale’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the study’s co-lead author.
By reconstructing the evolutionary history of key genes involved in adaptive immunity, the researchers learned that multiple groups of deep-sea anglerfishes convergently degenerated their adaptive immunity, enabling sexual parasitism. And although sexual parasitism was evolving as deep-sea anglerfishes moved into the deep sea, they concluded that it is not necessarily the key trait driving species diversification among ceratioids.
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