Virgin Komodo dragon is expecting
POSTED: 1:25 p.m. EST, December 20, 2006
LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Flora, a pregnant Komodo dragon living
in a British zoo, is expecting eight babies in what scientists said
on Wednesday could be a Christmas virgin birth.
Flora has never mated, or even mixed, with a male dragon, and
fertilized all the eggs herself, a process culminating in
parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. Other lizards do this, but
scientists only recently found that Komodo dragons do too.
"Nobody in their wildest dreams expected this. But you have a female
dragon on her own. She produces a clutch of eggs and those eggs turn
out to be fertile. It is nature finding a way," Kevin Buley of
Chester Zoo in England said in an interview.
He said the incubating eggs could hatch around Christmas.
Parthenogenesis has occurred in other lizard species, but Buley and
his team said this was the first time it has been shown in Komodo
dragons -- the world's largest lizards.
Scientists at Liverpool University in northern England discovered
Flora had had no male help after doing genetic tests on three eggs
that collapsed after being put in an incubator.
The tests on the embryos and on Flora, her sister and other dragons
confirmed that Komodo dragons can reproduce through self-fertilization.
"Those genetic tests confirmed absolutely that Flora was both the
mother and the father of the embryos. It completely blew us away
because it (parthenogenesis) has never been seen in such a large
species," Buley explained.
A Komodo dragon at London Zoo gave birth earlier this year after
being separated from males for more than two years.
Scientists thought she had been able to store sperm from her earlier
encounter with a male but, after hearing about Flora's eggs,
researchers conducted tests which showed her eggs were also produced
without male help.
"You have two institutions within a few short months of each other
having a previously unheard of event. It is really quite
unprecedented," said Buley.
The scientists, reporting the discovery in the science journal
Nature, said it could help them understand how reptiles colonize new
areas. A female dragon could, for instance, swim to another island
and establish a new colony on her own.
"The genetics of self-fertilization in lizards means that all her
hatchlings would have to be male. These would grow up to mate with
their own mother and therefore, within one generation, there would
potentially be a population able to reproduce normally on the new
island," Buley added.