Inbreeding: Bad for Kings, Good for Fish

There are plenty of reasons not to fool around with your siblings or even your cousins. Just check out the sad history of the European monarchies, whose inbreeding created plenty of wacko and/or dangerous kings and queens.

Then there's Hitler, at least in fiction. According to Norman Mailer's new novel, the fuhrer was a product of incest, something that can make a person great (in a good or evil way) because family traits become even more powerful.

Evolution -- not to mention society -- seems to realize that incest is bad. But not all species have gotten the memo, apparently:

Although breeding between close kin is thought to begenerally unfavorable from an evolutionary standpoint, in part becauseharmful mutations are more easily propagated through populations inthis way, theory predicts that under some circumstances, the benefitsof inbreeding may outweigh the costs.

Researchers have now reported real-life evidence insupport of this theory. Studying an African chiclid fish species,
Pelvicachromis taetiatus, in which both parents participate in broodcare, the researchers found that individuals preferred mating withunfamiliar close kin rather than non-kin.

In other words, the fish prefer to mate with relatives they've never met.

Sounds like the plot of a Lifetime movie to me.

For Some Species, An Upside To Inbreeding [Science Daily]