clam animal Status & Images 2011

Amidst the animal kingdom’s menagerie of sexual practices, those of Corbicula clams stand out.
A common freshwater genus about the size of a half-dollar, most Corbicula species reproduce by cloning. That’s odd, albeit not extraordinary. They’re also physically hermaphroditic but genetically male — again odd, but not extraordinary.
What’s really strange is that, once in a great while, they hijack fresh DNA from other clams.
“They can steal the eggs of other species,” said David Hillis, a University of Texas at Austin computational biologist whose Corbicula investigations are described May 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Usually, the whole maternal genome is then kicked out. But sometimes they keep some of the genes, and incorporate them into their own genome.”
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