A Cambodian pit viper.
Reptiles were once thought to only give virgin birth in captivity. A researcher at North Carolina State University now believes that virgin births also happen in the wild. From Scientific American:
Warren Booth, a molecular ecologist at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, now reports the first known case of wild facultative parthenogenesis, publishing the study today in Biology Letters.
In work conducted while he was at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Booth and his colleagues captured pregnant wild copperheads and cottonmouths, which gave birth in the lab. The researchers suspected that some of the snakes had reproduced without male input: in comparison with those born from sexual unions, says Booth, asexually reproduced snake litters typically have a large number of failures in development such as stillborn babies, and few viable males. When he saw that some of the snakes had delivered broods with these characteristics, “these litters were at the top of my agenda to genotype”, says Booth.
…
Booth examined genetic markers in the mothers and offspring to check whether the young snakes had really been born as a result of facultative parthenogenesis, or were unusual broods sired by males that were genetically similar to the mother.
“When I got the results of the DNA sequencer, I was floored,” he says. The genotyping compared the genetic make-up of the offspring with the populations from which the snakes were collected; the results indicated that the chance of a male contribution was “infinitesimally small”. Researchers had always believed that facultative parthenogenesis took place in the wild, Booth notes, but he and his colleagues were “stunned” at finally finding the evidence.
