Komodo dragons

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      Baby sand dollars clone themselves when they sense danger

      Posted by Jeff from Seattle Times

      A graduate student has discovered that sand dollars have a surprising survival strategy: Faced with the threat of being gobbled up, it makes like Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies and clones itself. Similarly, in Birds Do It, Bees Do It, Dragons Don't Need To, it's reported that Komodo dragons under harsh conditions clone themselves in what seem like virgin births. So why do we need males? With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.

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      Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don’t Need To.

      Posted by Jeff from New York Times

      But these eggs — two of which hatched a few weeks ago — were unusual: they developed from a female that had had no male of the species in close proximity for more than a decade. Judging from similar occurrences over the past two years in Britain, it appears that these lizards sometimes use a form of virgin birth in which eggs hatch without conception. The embryos are genetic clones of the mother.

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    Jeff

    Member since Jul 2008

    Jeff is the founder of NewsCloud. He is also a freelance writer and blogs at Idealog.

    Seattle


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