Virgin Births

In nature, necessity truly is the mother of invention, and apparently, a father isn’t always necessary. On January 24, 2007, an eight-year-old Komodo dragon named Flora, living in a zoo near Manchester, England, gave birth to five babies.

This is good news for the endangered species, but completely unexpected given that Flora has never had sex or has even met a male dragon. Nonetheless, scientists realized in December that Flora was pregnant, and indeed was near the end of her eight-month gestation period. The baby dragons are all doing well.

As a result of Flora’s feat, scientists at the London zoo decided that their female dragon, Sungai, who had given birth in April despite two years without male contact, had also undergone a virgin birth or parthenogenesis. They had previously assumed that she had been storing sperm from a male.

Other lizards have been known to give birth by parthenogenesis, but scientists have never known Komodos to have that ability.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Under-reported. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.