In 2001, Seth Bordenstein and his mentor Jack Werren were studying two closely related species of parasitic wasp: Nasonia giraulti and Nasonia longicornis. They have existed as separate species for just 400,000 years and to the untrained eye, they look identical – both tiny, with black bodies and orange legs. But they cannot breed. The two wasps carry different strains of Wolbachia; when they mate, the clash between these rival strains kills most of the hybrids. When Bordenstein took Wolbachia out of the equation with antibiotics, the hybrids survived. He showed that, in these wasps,
...more
