Fighting back against male-killers

Male-killing endosymbionts create a genetic black hole into which host nuclear genes vanish. In a recent paper, Hornett et al. transferred male-killing Wolbachia between different strains of the butterfly Hypolimnas bolina through hybridization and backcrossing. Their results provide unambiguous evidence of genetic variation for resistance to male-killers. A possible consequence of such variation is that male-killing might appear and disappear quickly on an evolutionary timescale.