By Susan Milius
Even without parking spaces, office refrigerators or other incitements to nastiness, bacteria in the wild can get downright spiteful.
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Bacteria from an Indiana hillside produce toxins that can kill rival strains of the same species that live several meters away, says evolutionary ecologist Hadas Hawlena of Indiana University in Bloomington. Such toxins, called bacteriocins, also hurt their producers by slowing growth or requiring that bacteria burst and die to distribute them.
From an evolutionary point of view, spite poses entertaining puzzles. As Andy Gardner of the University of Oxford in England puts it, ”Why would it ever pay an individual to perform a behavior that reduces its own reproductive success? This seems to go against the idea of the ’survival of the fittest.’”