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The More the Merrier?

Entropy and Statistics of Asexual Reproduction in Freshwater Planarians

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An Erratum to this article was published on 11 October 2012

Abstract

The trade-off between traits in life-history strategies has been widely studied for sexual and parthenogenetic organisms, but relatively little is known about the reproduction strategies of asexual animals. Here, we investigate clonal reproduction in the freshwater planarian Schmidtea mediterranea, an important model organism for regeneration and stem cell research. We find that these flatworms adopt a randomized reproduction strategy that comprises both asymmetric binary fission and fragmentation (generation of multiple offspring during a reproduction cycle). Fragmentation in planarians has primarily been regarded as an abnormal behavior in the past; using a large-scale experimental approach, we now show that about one third of the reproduction events in S. mediterranea are fragmentations, implying that fragmentation is part of their normal reproductive behavior. Our analysis further suggests that certain characteristic aspects of the reproduction statistics can be explained in terms of a maximum relative entropy principle.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 170 Carl Icahn Laboratory, Lewis-Sigler Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    Sofia Quinodoz, Michael A. Thomas & Eva-Maria Schötz

  2. Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, CB3 0WA, UK

    Jörn Dunkel

Authors
  1. Sofia Quinodoz
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  2. Michael A. Thomas
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  3. Jörn Dunkel
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  4. Eva-Maria Schötz
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Correspondence to Eva-Maria Schötz.

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An erratum to this article can be found online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10955-012-0608-5.

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Quinodoz, S., Thomas, M.A., Dunkel, J. et al. The More the Merrier?. J Stat Phys 142, 1324–1336 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-011-0157-3

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