Female Komodo Dragon Has Virgin Births

• At the Chester Zoo in London, a female Komodo dragon that had been living alone recently laid 25 eggs, 11 of which hatched.
• Scientists discovered that where normally the only one of the four egg cells produced by meiosis would survive, in rare cases in certain animals, one will become an egg while another will act like a "surrogate" sperm cell.
• This process, know as parthenogenesis, does not, however create clones of the parent due to the mixing around of the genes during meiosis.
• Hypothetically, this would allow a single komodo dragon to create an entire population, although it would have severely decreased genetic diversity, and many problems could arise due to the inbreeding that would follow.

Reflection:
I chose this story because i thought it strange that a single lizard could act as a mother and a father while giving birth to new offspring. If not for the rate of extinction at which komodo dragons are dieing off, this would allow them to increase their population at staggering rates, which I would guess would completely throw the ecosystem out of whack. I also found it interesting that one egg cell could so quickly and easily make such a dynamic change in its function. This is very much like stem cells which remind me of a story where a man uses the stem cells of a lizard to bring them back from the dead. Also this article brings to mind the recent video "Why Sex?"