Why All Those Lesbian Lizards Look Alike

In recent years, some folks have hyper-ventilated over the fact that man is now capable of cloning sheep, cattle, chickens, etc. I wonder if they might relax a little bit if they knew that God has been cloning animals for many millennia

For example, believe it or not, there are no male Whiptail Lizards; all Whiptail Lizards are female, and all are natural clones.

What happens here is that two female Whiptail Lizards will engage in "pseudocopulation" in which one female gets on top of another and grinds away like a male, and then they reverse their respective roles. This activity stimulates egg production in both lizards, which then lay fertile eggs.

Oddly, females of several lizard species are able to reproduce themselves without a male being present -- a trait called parthenogenesis. Aside from Whiptail lizards, however, other lizard species seem to engage in this behavior fairly rarely, and only when a female lizard cannot find a mate for a really long time. A recent high-profile example of parthenogenesis recently occurred when two female Komodo Dragons -- one at the London Zoo and one at the Chester Zoo in the U.K. -- reproduced without benefit of a male being present.

Domestic honeybees are also capable of engaging in parthenogenesis, and so too can a few species of ants, some sharks, quite a number of frogs species, and (very, very rarely) some birds such as domestic chickens and turkeys.

Lizards, of course, have notable sex lives even without parthenogenesis: male lizards have forked penises. Snakes are similarly equipped. So far this little bit of knowledge has not been of much use to me at the job site, but I am ever-hopeful.

For other posts along this twisted line of thought, see:

• No Vigara Needed
• Transexual and Transgender Wildlife
• Give That Clone a Bone
• Is a Cloned Afghan the Beginning of End for Shows?