Online:
Visits:
Stories:
Profile image
Story Views

Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

‘Virgin Births’ Observed In Sawfish, Potentially Rewriting Biology Textbooks

Thursday, June 4, 2015 8:43
% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

Great news for the critically endangered Sawfish. Researchers at New York’s Stony Brook University are astonished.  The report states that sawfish have been discovered to be capable of having virgin births, up to 3% of the species found in an estuary in Florida were born under parthenogenesis ‘virgin births’, the offspring seem intact! 

The sawfish is critically endangered, and currently only found in Florida.

inquisitr.com

A critically endangered species of sawfish has been observed reproducing through parthenogenesis, a process of “virgin birth” that biologists have previously believed incapable of producing viable offspring.

According to researchers at New York’s Stony Brook University, smalltooth sawfish have been observed asexually reproducing, something that they assert has never before been viably documented in vertebrate animals. The population of sawfish was discovered in an estuary in Florida, according to the Huffington Post, and approximately 3 percent of the animals were determined to be the product of virgin births.

In Florida, the sawfish that were determined to come from virgin births are living in harmony with the rest of the population, which were conceived through normal means. That fact has astonished researchers, who say that while parthenogenesis isn’t rare in the animal kingdom, viable offspring from the births are. Snakes, insects, fish, and lizards have all been known to give birth spontaneously, particularly when in captivity, but usually the offspring are unfit, according to Andrew Fields, the Ph.D. candidate responsible for the study.

“The fact that we are seeing these survive in the wild is a big step. As far as we can tell… there was no outward sign of them not behaving as the other ones that we saw.”

Continue Reading Here

Report abuse

Comments

Your Comments
Question   Razz  Sad   Evil  Exclaim  Smile  Redface  Biggrin  Surprised  Eek   Confused   Cool  LOL   Mad   Twisted  Rolleyes   Wink  Idea  Arrow  Neutral  Cry   Mr. Green

Top Stories
Recent Stories

Register

Newsletter

Email this story
Email this story

If you really want to ban this commenter, please write down the reason:

If you really want to disable all recommended stories, click on OK button. After that, you will be redirect to your options page.