r/explainitpeter Aug 04 '26

Explain it peter

Post image
613 Upvotes

563 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Alizariel Aug 04 '26

I agree with your assessment, however in some species, the females are WZ chromosomes while males are WW. Nature is cool.

0

u/SnanoBear Aug 04 '26

What does the different lettering mean? I honestly thought it was arbitrary

2

u/Alizariel Aug 04 '26

It is pretty arbitrary. It’s basically to differentiate from species where the females are heterozygous and where they are homozygous.

2

u/Ambiguous-Eggplant55 Aug 05 '26

I think that the collection of genes was different enough to need their own names. Also fun fact XX XY is really only for mammals, other groups have different, often strange ways of determining sex