Some basic biology i’ve learned is that inbreeding causes problems because the genes aren’t diverse enough, but insects breed with what’s essentially their mother. How does that work?
In: Biology
Which insects do you mean? Because plenty of insects never meet their mother, as she dies after laying her eggs.
They breed so frequently and have such high number of offspring that genetic mutations are not noticed like in humans, for example if a few insects die out of thousands that is not as consequential as if a human gives birth to an inbred child with a birth defect. Also many insects do have genetic diversity because their population is large and they reproduce quickly.
They don’t mate with their mothers. Young queen bees will leave the hive, meet with drones from other hives, mate, and then start their own colony. All the workers are basically clones, but the actually fertile members of the hives do exchange genetic material with other hives.
Check out how many offpsring most insects have. Hundreds upon hundreds sometimes. For some good examples there are like 2 million ants per person on Earth, and like 8 million flys per person on Earth. That is a *lot* of mixing of different genetics. I know you mentioned bees but most young queen bees will go off to form a hive and find a drone from another hive, and the offspring they have is infertile.
Funnily enough, I just heard the explanation to this recently. Check minute 8:30 of this video:
[Maya explains incest between bugs:](https://youtu.be/d_DrSPxqR48?si=Jlxpu-F_0jnSGsn7)
Hope the link is formatted correctly, first time doing so an on mobile 🙂
Also many colonial insects the queens take sperm from several males so even if the hives were to breed this way (they don’t females go on mating flights and a male from other colonies join) it would not be a serious issue for generations. The problem when you look at say tasmanian devils or cheetahs is long term system interbeeding problems from population bottlenecks. The Tasmanian devils is from 4 or 5 attempts to wipe it out. And in the Cheetahs case it never really recovered from whatever contracted its population 70 000 years ago (and it was not humanity the same thing happened to us) and another one 10 000 years ago. The latter put them where they are today. Of course with plenty of help from modern humans but that is a more recent issue than their historical problems of nearly being wiped out a few times.
You ever see a praying mantis with Down’s syndrome?
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