Parthenogenesis in California Condors

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.

And guess what? One of those birds capable of parthenogenesis, in rare conditions, is the California Condor. From the Atlantic comes this story:

When you get to be as endangered as the California condor, your sex life becomes a highly public affair. Since 1983, when the number of California condors in existence was a mere 22, biologists have been carefully breeding the birds in captivity. They kept track of who mated with whom, how many offspring they had, and when those offspring were released into the wild. All of this is logged in the official California-condor “studbook.”

So it was quite a shock when, a few years ago, scientists conducting DNA tests as part of routine research found two condors with unexpected paternity. These two birds—known by their studbook numbers as SB260 and SB517—did not have their fathers recorded in the studbook. Actually, they had no fathers at all. A full 100 percent of their DNA had come from their respective mothers. “We were confronted with this inexplicable data set,” says Oliver Ryder, a conservation geneticist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. 

The birds in question had some health problems, a sign they were likely parthenotes, which tend to be small in size, have spinal issues, and poor semen quality.

Outside of the commercial poultry arena, parthenogenesis has not been well studied, but within that arena it's been found that different chickens and turkey breeds have significantly different rates of parthenogenesis, ranging from 0.16 percent in Barred Plymouth Rock chickens, to 3 percent in commercial turkeys, to 16.9 percent in Beltsville small white turkeys. Poultry scientists selecting for parthenogenesis have managed to increaser the incidence in Beltsville small white turkey parthenogenesis to 41.5 percent in five generations -- a truly phenomenal rate.