“Mealybugs are the Russian nesting dolls of the animal world. Their bodies harbor a bacterium that helps them turn plant sap into usable nutrients, and this bacterium itself harbors an even smaller bacterium, creating a three-tiered symbiotic relationship that hasn’t been observed in any other animal. Now scientists have figured out how both microbes pitch in to keep the mealybugs well fed—a finding that could offer a glimpse at how our own mitochondria evolved.”
This is truly fascinating. What surprises me is that there are not more examples of this. This report is about the genomics, but the symbiosis was discovered in 2001. I’m curious to understand the biology of this symbiosis, how does the mealybug and the first bacteria keep the infection from generation to generation.
