Shark’s virgin birth

GEE, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Check out this story on some female sharks that are, well, apparently capable of virgin births:

A team of American and Irish researchers have discovered that some female sharks can reproduce without having sex, the first time scientists have found the unusual capacity in such an ancient vertebrate species.

Their report that sharks can produce asexually through the process known as parthenogenesis is being published online today in the British journal Biology Letters. Researchers have observed parthenogenesis in certain species of birds, reptiles, amphibians and bony fishes, but the new finding suggests that vertebrates’ ability to reproduce without sex evolved much earlier than scientists had thought.

Scientists began their investigation after a female hammerhead shark was mysteriously born at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo in December 2001, in a tank that held three adult, female hammerheads but no males. The 7-inch-long baby was killed within a day its birth, apparently because another fish in the tank, most likely a stingray, attacked it.

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