Haplodiploidy

Common card · No. 353569

Haplodiploidy is a sex-determination system in which males develop from unfertilized eggs and are haploid with one set of chromosomes, and females develop from fertilized eggs and are diploid with two sets of chromosomes. Jan Dzierżon discovered in 1835 that an unfertilised queen bee could produce male offspring. In 1903, Friedrich Meyes showed that male bees produced sperm without reduction division, i.e. they were haploid like their sperm. Haplodiploidy is universal in the Hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps) and Thysanoptera (thrips), and occurs in some other arthropods including scale insects and spider mites, and in some rotifers. Haplodiploidy makes worker bees unusually closely related; it has been proposed that this helped eusociality to evolve in the Hymenoptera, but a survey of many taxa has found no evidence that this occurred. Haplodiploidy is neither necessary nor sufficient for eusociality to evolve, as there are both social and non-social species in the Hymenoptera, and there...

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