The bacterium Wolbachia is arguably the world's most successful parasite, infecting around 20% of all insects, themselves an extraordinarily successful group. It can infect eggs but not sperm, which means that females can pass the bacteria on to their offspring, but males cannot. As a result, Wolbachia has it in for males - they are evolutionary dead-ends, and the bacterium has many strategies for getting rid of them. It can kill them outright, it can turn them into females and it can prevent them from mating with uninfected females. As a result, populations infected with Wolbachia can be virtually male-free.More details at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Photo from Wikipedia Commons depicts the Blue Moon butterfly of New Zealand, one of the subjects in the study excerpted above.
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