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