the usual queen of hearts race resulted
I think you mean 'Red Queen', you are thinking of the wrong Alice book.
I suspect you were thinking of the work by Boraas in which unicellular cultures of
Chlorella developed aggregating forms to avoid predation by
Ochromonas(Boraas, et al., 1998).
Phagotrophy by a flagellate selects for colonial prey: A possible origin of multicellularity
Boraas ME, Seale DB, Boxhorn JE
EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY 12 (2): 153-164 FEB 1998
Predation was a powerful selective force promoting increased morphological complexity in a unicellular prey held in constant environmental conditions. The green alga, Chlorella vulgaris, is a well-studied eukaryote, which has retained its normal unicellular form in cultures in our laboratories for thousands of generations. For the experiments reported here, steady-state unicellular C. vulgaris continuous cultures were inoculated with the predator Ochromonas vallescia, a phagotrophic flagellated protist (`flagellate'). Within less than 100 generations of the prey, a multicellular Chlorella growth form became dominant in the culture (subsequently repeated in other cultures). The prey Chlorella first formed globose clusters of tens to hundreds of cells. After about 10-20 generations in the presence of the phagotroph, eight-celled colonies predominated. These colonies retained the eight-celled form indefinitely in continuous culture and when plated onto agar. These self-replicating, stable colonies were virtually immune to predation by the flagellate, but small enough that each Chlorella cell was exposed directly to the nutrient medium.
This was following on from previous work in ...
Boraas, M. E.
Predator induced evolution in chemostat culture.
Transactions of the American Geophysical Union. 1983. 64:1102
This is frequently cited and is part of the TalkOrigins
'Observed instances of speciation' FAQ. Be aware though that this reference has fooled many people by talking about the colonial form keying out as being in a different family, this simply means that they more resemble the
Coelosphaerium family morphologically but it is often made out to be some wildly exaggerated claim about the algae having switched families.
I think you might be conflating this with Rrhain's ever popular experimental evolution example which involves Bacteriophages, for his source material see
this post.
TTFN,
WK
This message has been edited by Wounded King, 06-16-2005 08:41 AM
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