The Pros and Cons of Asexual Reproduction
Making babies requires a male and a female, a sperm and an egg, right? Well, the wild world of animals is often more creative than the lot of us humans when it comes to making whoopee. In fact, some animals don't have sex at all, thank you very much. Just this month, bug biologists found the first all-female ant species, Mycocepurus smithii. The queen ant clones herself by making eggs that develop into adult females without fertilization. Some of those females will then become queens themselves. Apparently the species has been sexless for enough generations that the ants might not be able to mate even if they wanted to. Dissections showed that a key female sex part that normally interlocks with a male organ during mating had shrunken to a ghost of its former self. read more