This article originally appeared in Sick Papes, a blog about exciting new science papers. Today’s Sick Pape focuses on one of the types of animals that Leeuwenhoek saw when he magnified a drop of ...

Staying celibate can be a difficult task, but bdelloid rotifers have managed to survive without sex for nearly 50 million years. Scientists now think they have cracked the secret to these microscopic ...

Sexual reproduction is costly, but it is nearly ubiquitous among plants and animals, whereas obligately asexual taxa are rare and almost always short-lived. The Red Queen hypothesis proposes that sex ...

Microscopic creatures called bdelloid rotifers have thrived without mating for millions of years. How they did it could reveal why sex is so essential for almost everyone else. If all the animals on ...

The Bdelloid rotifer has survived 30 to 40 million years without ever having sex. Without genetic variation from sexual reproduction to defend against predators these small invertebrates should have ...

Skoltech's evolutionary biologists discovered recombination in bdelloid rotifers, microscopic freshwater invertebrates, which have long been regarded as 'an evolutionary scandal' due to their presumed ...

Russian researchers have pulled off a feat that sounds closer to science fiction than standard lab work, reviving microscopic ...

You inherited your genes from your parents, half from your father and half from your mother. Almost all other animals contend with the same hand-me-down processes, but not the bdelloid rotifers. This ...

Russian researchers have coaxed microscopic animals back to life after they spent roughly 24,000 years locked in Siberian ice ...

Seventy-five years ago, in the title of their classic send-up of how- to books, James Thurber and E.B. White famously asked, "Is Sex Necessary?" At last, an answer is emerging: No, sex isn't necessary ...

In Mother Nature's edition of the TV reality show Survivor, the bdelloid rotifers would probably be the last animals standing. These tiny aquatic creatures can survive high blasts of radiation and ...

Russian scientists successfully revived 24,000-year-old micro-organisms, bdelloid rotifers, from Siberian permafrost, ...