Female Sharks Can Reproduce Alone

[asher553]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/22/AR2007052201405.html

A team of American and Irish researchers have discovered that some female sharks can reproduce without having sex, the first time that scientists have found the unusual capacity in such an ancient vertebrate species.

Their report that sharks can reproduce asexually through the process known as parthenogenesis is being published online today in the British journal Biology Letters. Researchers have observed parthenogenesis in certain species of birds, reptiles, amphibians and bony fishes, but the new finding suggests that vertebrates' ability to reproduce without sex evolved much earlier than scientists had thought.

Scientists began their investigation after a female hammerhead shark was mysteriously born at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo in December 2001, in a tank that held three adult, female hammerheads but no males. The seven-inch-long baby was killed within a day of its birth, apparently because another fish in the tank, probably a stingray, attacked it.

Those damn stingrays.

Though the three females had been caught before they reached sexual maturity and held in captivity for more than three years, researchers initially thought one had stored sperm from a male shark before fertilizing an egg. But the team -- which included scientists at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, Queen's University Belfast and the zoo -- determined that the baby shark's genetic makeup perfectly matched one of the females in the tank, with no sign of a male parent.

Read the rest at the link. Hat tip: Tammy.
http://tammybruce.com/