Abstract
Sex is considerably more costly for an organism than clonal reproduction. How it conveys sufficient benefits to outweigh this cost remains unclear. One of the main arguments that such benefits exist is the wide distribution of sex and the short evolutionary lifespan of asexual lineages. However, too little is known about the reproductive biology of microorganisms to be certain that sex is wide-spread among them. Among the epichloë endophytes the ability to carry out sexual reproduction is frequently lost, and closely related sexual and asexual lineages can be readily collected. This offers an opportunity to test if asexual endophyte lineages have a shorter lifespan than sexual lineages, which would indicate that sex conveys advantages to epichloë endophytes. Using a novel phylogeny-based statistical approach, we found strong evidence that asexual endophyte lineages are short-lived compared to sexual lineages. Keywords: sex, clonal reproduction, evolutionary biology, ecology
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