Niftybiologyfilter

[petefred]

Population bottlenecks suck.

Comments

[yellowphoton]

woa... that's so cool. Ah, the endless sci-fi potential of the 'colony ship dies out due to contagious tumor' variety.

[petefred]

"Behavior modifying contagious tumors" would be a great name for a rock band.

[finglegend]

There’s a canine cancer that spreads similarly.

[petefred]

Ooh, neat; thanks for the link! Looks like it cites a couple of other transmissible tumors that have arisen in other species as well.

The sad part in the Tasmanian devil case is that unlike most of the others, it looks like population homogeneity, rather than adaptation on the part of the tumor, that makes it transmissible.

[petefred]

(Same thing as the case from the Syrian hamster that they mention, although the article for that one is from 1983)

ooh rambling now

[tdapenguin]

see, here is evolution in action. there were strange lifeforms alive in the cambrian. my favorite might have been hallucinigenia. (no i can't remember it's spelling)