The Bizarre Biology of Bdelloid Rotifers with The Biological Recording Company

Dr Chris Wilson (University of Oxford) provides insights on reproduction, disease and antibiotics from these microscopic animals.

Bdelloid rotifers are tiny filter-feeding animals that live in freshwater habitats worldwide: in ponds, streams and lakes, even where the water sometimes dries up or freezes, like moss, soil, puddles and ice sheets. They are among the most resilient of all animals, and also have some of the strangest biology.

Unlike other known animals, all bdelloid rotifers are females, with no sightings of males in the 300 years since they were discovered — rotifer mothers lay eggs that hatch into genetic copies of themselves, without sex, sperm or fertilisation.

Another surprise is that bdelloid rotifers have been stealing DNA from other organisms on a massive scale by a process called horizontal gene transfer, so that about one in ten of their genes have been copied from different kinds of life, including bacteria, fungi and even plants.

Among these stolen genes, we recently discovered that bdelloid rotifers have copied dozens of recipes for antibiotics from bacteria, which the rotifers now use to fight off their own diseases. This unusual defensive strategy could lead to short-cuts in the race to develop new drugs against antibiotic-resistant infections in human patients, and might also shed light on the strangely sexless lifestyle of these animals.

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