Transexual and Transgender Wildlife

A garter snake mating ball.  :: This is a repost from May 2007

My folks live in a section of Washington, D.C. that has a fairly vibrant "alternative lifestyles" population.

My parents are pretty tolerant and assume people do not have much choice about their sexual orientation, and no doubt they are right. Besides, what concern is it of anyone else? My folks ask of their gay neighbors the same as they ask of all the others: help keep litter off the sidewalk, plant flowers in your front yard, and keep everything well-painted and maintained. By those standards, the gay neighbors are often among the best.

That said, I was somewhat amused to learn my folks had a group of neighbors over for dinner a few evenings ago. The gay neighbors are no big deal -- most are otherwise very square. But what about the new cross-dresser next door?

Oh, of course he was invited.

And what did he wear? A nice dress, and I think some falsies.

Of course.

Like I said, my folks may be pushing past 70, but they are nothing if not broadminded. My father says the cross-dresser is extremely well-informed on international finance, and no doubt he is. It's not a cheap neighborhood.

Oddly, humans are not the only animals that engage in cross-dressing or have transgender identity issues; a lot of animals also have "gender-bender" sex lives.

Garter snakes, for example, not only engage in orgiastic bouts of group sex, but male cross-dressing garter snakes also show up for the festivities, oozing a female sex pheromone designed to confuse the other male snakes and give the cross-dressing snake (or so the theorists say) an opportunity to get in and inseminate the female before it is picked off by a predator.

The hyena is another cross-dresser, with male and female hyenas appearing to present both sets of sexual organs. In fact, hyenas are not true hermaphrodites, simply such good pseudo-hermaphrodites that the ancient Greeks were convinced they could change from male to female at will.

Then, of course there are fish, which really can change from male to female (and back again) at will. It turns out that if you toss a school of female salmon or hammerhead sharks in a tank, some will morph into working males.

Scientists call these sex-change artists successive hermaphrodites, and the phenomenon is far from uncommon. In fact, a huge number of fish (more than 100 species) will readily change genders, and some species of fish routinely change genders several times over the course of their lives.

Along with piscine sex-change artists, you also have fish that are simultaneous hermaphrodites. These are fish which come equipped with both testes and ovaries, and which normally produce eggs for about half their spawns, and sperm the other half.

There are other types of gender benders as well: homosexual seagulls, dogs, sheep and beaver, for example, and the occasional female bird which (due to disease, age or congenital defect) starts producing testosterone and develops both male plumage and a male sex drive.

At least one species of African frog is a sex-change artist, and in quite a few species of animals, the male takes over the duties normally "assigned" to females, such as is the case with the seahorse

Bottom line: It's a pretty wild world out there.

And to be clear: I'm not saying you're not feminine; I'm just saying you should shave closer.

All good and remember to respect all and love everyone for who they truly are.  Always. 

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Coffee and Provocation

Lassie and Timmy Say "No" to Mandatory Spay-Neuter:
From the Santa Clara County Signal: "On the eve of a controversial bill that is scheduled to be heard in a state Senate committee, opponents of the measure are getting a little help from some four-legged star power. A ninth generation descendent of the dog that played "Lassie" in the 1950s television series will be roaming the halls of the Capitol in Sacramento in opposition to the California Healthy Pet Act of 2007, a bill that would create a statewide mandate for the neutering of dogs and cats over six months of age. The Collie, whose name is also Lassie, will be joined by Jon Provost, the man who played "Timmy" in the series. The two will go office to office briefing legislators on the drawbacks to a bill some say could threaten the various dog and cat industries."

Timmy Says Take Action:
It's not too late to take action. Simply go to the PetPac site to see who to contact. And read this USA Today editorial in opposition to California's mandatory surgical sterilization law >> click here.

Cloning News:
South Korea has announced that, for reasons unknown, it is going to clone beagles to sniff for drugs at the border. What makes this so odd is that there is not much of a border to guard (Korea is a peninsula and both sides of the North Korean border are guarded by landmines and armed guards), and there's not a lot of illegal drug use in Korea. And never mind that sniffing out illegal drugs is not a genetic behavior, but a learned behavior, and never mind that there is no shortage of beagles anywhere in the world. The cost of this stupid-on-a-stick excercise is estimated to be over $50,000 per animal.

On the Frontiers of Good Government:
China executed the head of its FDA last week and one of his subordinates, which is something you would think would give pause to the folks over at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who have inspected nothing for years, and greenlighted everything from killer dog food to toxic toothpaste.

Two Billion Mice:
My daughter is in Thailand at the moment, so I am reading the local paper over there, which reports that "An estimated 2 billion field mice are chomping their way hungrily through crops in 22 counties around the Dongting Lake in central China's Hunan province after their homes on islands in the lake were flooded."
. . . . . Meanwhile, folks who are trying to live in the U.S.A. without buying Chinese-made goods are finding all the good mouse traps are made in China. Go figure.
. . . . . Finally, to round out the mouse news, the brain trust at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute reports that they have found a faster and cheaper way to make mutant mice. Their goal is to make 900 new lines of mutant mice by 2010. Hopefully they will be released in China which seems to have the mousetrap market all sewn up.

Go Green (Very, Very Fast):
The young (26-year old) Al Gore III was nailed for driving very fast with a wide assortment of illegal prescription drugs in his car. My condolences to Al and Tipper Gore; it's never easy being a parent. Some mystery surrounds the initial news reports, however, such as: How the hell do you get a Prius up to 100-miles per hour? The answer to that question can be found >> here.

Elk Tag Auction: Doing Well and Doing Good:
Ben Nicholson won a New Mexico tag in a raffle from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Ben cannot use the tag, but he is allowed to sell it, and that sale is happening as an auction through the HuntingLife.com web site and blog, with 10 percent of the proceeds to go to conservation. Let the bidding begin!
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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?

Retreat of the Clones

Genetic Savings and Clone is not accepting new orders for clones because the company was "unable to develop the technology to the point that cloning pets is commercially viable," according to a letter sent out to its clients.

The company, started by octogenarian billionaire John Sperling, has cloned a total of two cats for sale, including Little Nicky, whose owner paid $50,000 for the duplicate in 2004. The company also charged clients to bank genetic material from pets they intended to clone.

The long-sought goal of replicating John Sperling's husky (or is is border collie?) mix, named Missy, who died in 2002 at the age of 15, has never been achieved.

Give That Clone a Bone

Back in 1998 John Sperling decided to clone his dog. Sperling was, at the time, the 79-year old founder of something call the "University of Phoenix," which can best be described as a very-for-profit continuing education system married to a huge internet-based correspondence school.

The University of Phoenix is now the largest private university in the United States, with more than 140,000 students attending classes at 41 campuses, and it is supported by over $1.6 billion in U.S. Government sanctioned-student loans. Sterling became a billionaire in less than 15 years by simply marrying the old correspondence-school idea to the internet.

All of this is by way of introduction to John Sperling's dog cloning project, which is one of the ways Mr. Sperling is spending his considerable fortune.

It seems Mr. Sperling used to have a cross-bred border collie by the name of Missy. Sperling got the idea it might be possible to clone Missy whom, he decided, was a very special genetic combination.

And why not clone a dog? Sperling's brain storm occurred just two years after Scottish scientists had cloned Dolly the Sheep. How hard could a dog be?

And so John Sperling put up millions of dollars to create the "Genetic Savings and Clone" company with the "Missyplicity Project" at its heart.

Missy died at age 15, in 2002, before efforts to clone her had succeeded, but her tissue has been well-preserved and she will, no doubt, be cloned within a few years.

Meanwhile, the "Genetic Savings and Clone" company is moving along apace. The company was the first in the world to clone a cat, creating a kitten called CC (Copy Cat), and in February of 2004, the company launched the world's first commercial cat cloning service.

On the canine front, the company is offering genetic banking of dog tissue in anticipation of the commercial viability of a stable and reliable canine cloning procedure. For $900 to $1,400 per pooch, the Genetic Savings and Clone company will collect and store biopsy samples of your beloved dog in anticipation of that Great Day when dead dogs will rise out of the ground and stand at the right hand of Jesus ... or at least until you are willing to have it cloned.

In 2005, the first dog was supposedly cloned in Korea (an Afghan of all things). Though genetic testing supposedly confirms the validity of this clone, the scientist doing the research has faked other research data and some doubts remain.

What is not in doubt is that cloning a dog is harder than cloning a cat and a reliable and stable procedure and protocol have yet to be worked out.

But it is clearly only a matter of time.

In 1998 the Ishikawa Prefectural Livestock Research Center produced Noto and Kaga, the first cows cloned from adult cells, and the next year the University of Hawaii produced the first male clone -- a mouse. In 2000, Chinese researchers produced the first cloned goat, and the next year Advanced Cell Technologies cloned "Noah," a rare gaur (a type of wild cow). In 2002, researchers at Trans Ova Genetics and Advanced Cell Technologies produced the first banteng (another ungulate), born to a surrogate domestic cow, with the genetic material taken from a donor that had died 23 years earlier and whose cells has been preserved in the "Frozen Zoo" at the San Diego Zoo's Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Species.

In 2003, Italy produced the first cloned horse, and that same year the University of Idaho produced a pair of cloned mules, while the University of Texas cloned a whitetail deer. Everyone was getting into the act!

In 2005, researchers at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans (not related to the National Audubon Society) naturally breed unrelated African wildcat clones, resulting in the birth of African wildcat kittens -- the first time unrelated clones of a wild species had produced offspring.

What's next?

Well, another dog or two, for sure. A human being or two is a pretty safe bet, as are gorillas and chimpanzees for medical research. Millions of genetic mice and other small test animals are an eventual certainty. A cloned mammoth (from frozen cells gleaned from long-frozen Siberian carcasses) is not beyond imagination.

But what of cloned dogs? Let's assume that the health issues associated with cloning are worked out (about a quarter of all animals born through cloning have some kind of cloning-related health problem). Who is going to buy these cloned pups?

It may not be the market you think. The racing horse industry has already banned clones, and I think it's safe to say the Kennel Club will follow suit.

Hunting dogs may be a very real canine cloning market. Who wants the risk of a working terrier that is too big, or a pointer with no interest in birds? For the lurcher man, a baying dog is a nightmare, while for the houndsman a dead-mute dog is a serious nuisance. Everyone wants a dog with gameness, tractability, brains and a nose. If you've hunted with a "one-in-a-million" dog, you may want to pass that dog on to your kids 50 years from now.

On the pet side of the equation, there will always be a demand for "guaranteed-healthy" dogs that are going to be"just so" in terms of size, coloring and temperament.

Look for "clone shops" to advertise terriers and beagles that do not bark and border collies that are entirely apathetic. After all, it is the prey-drive of these animals that make them "problem pets" for so many urban and suburban owners. A defective border collie is just what some people want.

That said, I suspect that most people just want a dog, and are not going to spring for a test tube pup-ciscle hatched out in a lab. In fact, a cultural aversion to such fetish perfectionism may develop.

It is a fac, however, that technology and biology tend to creep -- and sometimes gallop -- on to the human stage. It is entirely possible that, in just 50-years time, cloned dogs will be passed down from father to son (or daughter) and on to human clone.

Yes, yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Your cloned self (it's never too early to bank a little tissue) may one day hunt with your cloned dog (cryonic technicians are standing by) in genetically modified fields and forests.

The game may be a natural animal or perhaps a clone (what species would you like to hunt today, Sir?) or perhaps even a chimera with just enough exotic genes spliced into its double-helix that it provides an entirely different kind of hunting sport -- a faster flying duck, a larger whitetail with elk-like antlers, or a 10-pound European rabbit entirely immune to North American rabbit diseases.

I know I am supposed to be terribly concernd about all this, but I find it increasingly hard to get terrified. Having grown up in the shadow of The Bomb ("duck and cover little children") and news stories about chemicals in the air and water, mass extinctions, global warming, AIDS and avian flu pandemics, I no longer scare easily.

Besides, what are you going to do? If people want cloned dogs, they will get them, never mind that they reduce genetic variability.

You will have more success holding back the ocean with sand castles than you will trying to stop those seeking a quick profit or instant gratification.

In the end, you have to bet that Mother Nature and Father Time will work it all out. It's always a good bet they will bat last in this game. They always do.

No, this is not a real ad. But it might be
part of the real market for cloned pets.

Cloned Dog Not a Fake

A Korean science company has run tests on the dog that Korean scientists claimed they had cloned and they say the dog is indeed the result of a cloning process. The Korean scientists tnat made the claim, HwangWoo-suk, is under fire for fabricating virtually all of his embryonic stem cell research. The Korean institute HumanPass ran tests and determined that Snuppy is the world's first cloned dog. It said DNA fingerprint tests showed cells from Snuppy matched those of its cell donor, an Afghan hound named Thai.

Canine Genetics Made Easy?

First we had artificial insemination, then we had artificial insemination with frozen sperm ("pupcicles"), and then we had dogs being cloned ("Clone, clone on the range, where the dogs and the puppies all play ..."

Now scientists have mapped almost the entire canine genome. The article below, from The Boston Globe, gives the details:

Team of Scientists Maps Out 99% of Dog Genome

Scientists have finished a sophisticated map of a dog's genes, providing new insights into the deep links between humans and one of their most treasured animals, as well as creating a unique tool for studying a range of diseases, from cancer to blindness, that affect people and their dogs.

The team of scientists, led by the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, determined virtually the entire genetic code, or genome, of the dog, making the achievement the canine equivalent of the completion two years ago of the Human Genome Project, the scientists said yesterday. Rough drafts of the dog genome have been released over the past several years, but the new work represents the first highly accurate version and also includes, for the first time, a detailed library of common genetic variations seen in dogs -- making possible a new generation of fast, accurate genetic studies of diseases and other traits.

Biologists have taken up the genetics of many animals, but the dog is uniquely interesting and useful, the scientists said, because of its history. The modern dog, including several hundred breeds, is the product of thousands of years of careful breeding, aimed at drawing out specific behaviors, such as the obsessive herding of the Border collie, or appearances, such as the hairless Chinese crested. By applying the modern tools of genetics to these breeds, it is now easy to find the small genetic variations responsible for the differences, with applications from dog breeding to human psychiatry. The genetic map of the dog announced yesterday should also accelerate the search for the genetic causes of diseases that plague certain breeds, perhaps leading to cures for dog and man alike.

''It is a historic day in the relationship between man and dog," said Eric S. Lander at a press conference yesterday, as a pug and an Akita tussled in the back of the room at the Bayside Exposition Center, where a dog show was being set up. Lander is the director of the Broad Institute and the owner of two golden retrievers.

Scientists said that the dog also stands as a testament to the power of evolution -- and its importance -- at a time when some are challenging its teaching in public schools. Looking for the genetic causes of human diseases in dogs makes sense only if humans and dogs are close evolutionary relatives that share a common ancestor -- a fact that is strongly supported by the genetic map Lander and his colleagues found.

''Biomedical research today depends on evolution," said Lander. ''It is hard to say that it is 'just a theory.' "

The research, which is reported today in the journal Nature, was led by Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, co-director of genome sequencing and analysis at the Broad Institute. Using a blood sample from a boxer named Tasha, the team determined about 99 percent of the sequence of DNA that makes up the dog genome.

The team, which included researchers across the United States as well as in France and the United Kingdom, also compiled a list of 2.5 million places in this sequence where there are common differences among dogs. This was done, according to the Nature paper, by comparing Tasha's DNA with DNA from a poodle and a number of other breeds -- enough, the scientists said, to record many of the most common variations in dogs.

Having this list of common differences will make it far easier for researchers to do genetic studies involving large numbers of dogs, because they can focus on the places in the genome where dogs are likely to have differences that might explain why one dog gets bone cancer and another does not. For example, scientists who are interested in why some greyhounds get bone cancer, and others do not, can look at these places to see if there is a pattern, without having to determine the entire genetic code of each dog -- about 2.4 billion molecules long. ''This is really the big thing," said Gregory M. Acland, a senior research associate at the Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University.

Many ailments -- including cancer, epilepsy, and heart disease -- are thought to be similar in dogs and humans, but it will be easier to identify the genes involved using dogs, said Acland, who studies genetic diseases that affect vision. In contrast to humans, dog breeds are highly in-bred, making two dogs in the same breed more similar genetically than two humans. Thus, for example, scientists could compare Dalmatians that are deaf with those that are not deaf, and there would be fewer random genetic differences between the dogs clouding the picture than if the same study were done in humans.

The work described yesterday, and follow-up work planned to study specific diseases, were made possible by the efforts of the American Kennel Club and dog owners who agreed to send in blood samples from their pets. (Owners of pure-breed dogs who are interested in participating can find more information at www.dogdna.org.) The research was funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Dogs themselves are a human creation, thought to have begun when people domesticated the wolf in East Asia. The new analysis suggests that this happened about 30,000 years ago, said Lindblad-Toh.

The researchers also compared the DNA of dogs with completed genomes for humans and mice, and what they found challenges one idea about what makes humans special. When the human genome was first compared with that of the mouse, several years ago, scientists found evidence that the genes that are active in the cells of the brain seem to have evolved more quickly in humans than in mice, hinting that this might explain the intellect of humans. The new analysis casts doubt on this theory, because it shows that the brain-related genes in dogs have been evolving just as fast as those of humans, according to Tarjei S. Mikkelsen, a scientist at the Broad. The dog has about 19,300 genes, slightly fewer than humans, who have about 20,000 genes, according to Lindblad-Toh.

The researchers also identified a portion of the genome, about 5 percent, that is shared by dogs, humans, and mice -- meaning this portion is apparently essential to mammals. Yet less than half of that is devoted to genes. What the rest of the genetic material does is a mystery, but it is thought that some of this material may regulate when the genes turn off and on in particular cells. Still, the fact that the function of this crucial part of the genome is unknown underlines how much there is to learn.

For those who have been involved in dog genetics for years, there is hope that the new work will put the dog on the same footing as other favorite research organisms, such as the fruit fly and the mouse. In a way, it is a logical next step for the dog, which has done so much for humans -- guardian, hunter, companion. Yet there is also irony in discovering the scientific potential of dogs, noted Mark W. Neff, a scientist at the Center for Veterinary Genetics at the University of California, Davis. ''We are so close to our pet dogs, that we stop thinking of them as this incredible, unique species," Neff said.

Is a Cloned Afghan the Beginning of End for Shows?

It's the first cloned dog -- an Afghan of all things. The process is very, very expensive and inefficient, but so was invitro fertilization 20 years ago; now it's how most of the top horse and cattle are being bred.

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Snuppy, the First Cloned Puppy
S. Korean scientists say creation will help in human disease research
By Joseph B. Verrengia, Associated Press, August 5, 2005

He could be just another frisky, long-haired puppy with a slightly dazed expression. But his genetic fingerprint says otherwise.

Meet Snuppy, the world's first cloned dog. Scientists duplicated this Afghan hound, born 14 weeks ago, using a skin cell plucked from another hound. The two dogs are three years apart but genetically identical, right down to their weird, tan eyebrows.

Snuppy was created by South Korea's pioneering stem cell scientist, smashing another biological barrier and reigniting a fierce ethical debate.

The researchers, led by Hwang Woo-suk, insist they cloned the Afghan hound, a resplendent supermodel in a world of mutts, only to help investigate human disease, including the possibility of cloning stem cells for treatment purposes.

The dog's appearance in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature stirred renewed calls for a global ban on the cloning of humans to produce babies.

"Successful cloning of an increasing number of species confirms the general impression that it would be possible to clone any mammalian species, including humans," said Ian Wilmut, a reproductive biologist at the University of Edinburgh who produced the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, from an adult cell nearly a decade ago.

Researchers have since cloned cats, goats, cows, mice, pigs, rabbits, horses, deer, mules and gaur, a large wild ox of Southeast Asia. So far, efforts to clone a monkey or another primate with the same techniques have failed.

Uncertainties about the health and life span of cloned animals persist; Dolly died prematurely in 2003 after developing cancer and arthritis.

Wilmut and others complimented Hwang's achievement. But they said politicians and scientists must face the larger and more delicate issue — how to extend research without crossing the moral boundary of duplicating human life in the lab.

"The ability to use the underlying technology in developing research models and eventually therapies is incredibly promising," said Robert Schenken, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. "However, the paper also points out that in dogs as in most species, cloning for reproductive purposes is unsafe."

The cloned puppy was the lone success from more than 100 dogs implanted with more than 1,000 cloned embryos.

In a news conference in Seoul, the cloning team also condemned the reproductive cloning of humans as "unsafe and inefficient." Human reproductive cloning already is banned in South Korea. Other nations, including the United States, are split over whether to ban just human cloning or cloning of all kinds, including the production of stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells are the source of all tissue. Researchers believe they can be coaxed to grow into heart, brain or nerve cells that could be used to renew ailing organs.

Last year, Hwang's team at Seoul National University created the world's first cloned human embryos. In May, they created the first embryonic stem cells that genetically match injured or sick patients.

The researchers insisted the dog experiment was aimed at creating a reliable research model.
Monkeys are the closest model to humans, and they are crucial to medical research, but Hwang told reporters that cloning a monkey "is technically impossible at the moment."

"Dogs share physiological characteristics with humans," he said. "A lot of diseases that occur in dogs can be directly transferred to humans."

Animal welfare groups criticized the experiment. "This technology could lead to a brave new world of puppy production if it were hijacked by profiteers seeking to use cloning to supply the pet trade," said Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States.

The researchers nicknamed their canine creation Snuppy, for "Seoul National University puppy," a reference to Hwang's lab. One of the dog's co-creators, Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, described Snuppy, now 14 weeks old, as "a frisky, healthy, normal, rambunctious puppy."

On scientific terms, the experiment's success was mixed. Like Dolly, Snuppy was created using a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Scientists took a skin cell from the ear of a 3-year-old male Afghan hound and extracted genetic material from the nucleus. They transferred it to an unfertilized egg whose nucleus was removed. The reconstructed egg holding the DNA from the donor cell was zapped with an electric current to stimulate cell division.

Dog eggs have been problematic because they are released from the ovary at an earlier, less mature stage than in other mammals. This time, the researchers collected more mature eggs from the donors' fallopian tubes.

They implanted 1,095 cloned embryos into 123 dogs and just three pregnancies resulted. That's a cloning efficiency rate lower than experiments with cats and horses. One fetus miscarried and one puppy died of pneumonia 22 days after birth.

That left Snuppy. He was delivered by Caesarean section from his surrogate mother, a yellow Labrador retriever.