Why does asexual reproduction in bacteria make it hard to define their species?
The previous answer has some significant errors. Asexual reproduction is not mitosis. Mitosis only occurs in eukaryotes. Bacteria asexually reproduce by binary fission or budding. Also, while bacteria don’t reproduce sexually by definition, they do regularly exchange genetic material. Anyway, to answer your question, the difficulty with bacteria is that it makes it difficult to use the old species concept of: “Two organisms that are able to reproduce naturally to produce fertile offspring,” (taken from wikipedia) since that definition requires sexual reproduction. Note there’s also some other reasons why it’s hard to define a bacterial species.
