[repost from before my blog went boom. But lady sharks are still fertilizing their own eggs and giving birth to baby sharks that don't have to buy their daddies a tie for Father's Day so it's still good.]

So I posted yesterday about the male seahorses that give birth.  Someone mentioned the curious nature of Australia’s platypus, which is to say the curious unnaturalness of it.

But then I thought, maybe we just don’t understand what natural is.

And THAT made me think of my favorite big new word: Parthenogenesis.

Apparently, a number of species are perfectly capable of simply giving birth to offspring with no fertilization necessary AT ALL.  No sperm.  No male.

She just kinda has an egg and it just kinda starts to grow and she just kinda gives birth to a child that has NO FATHER.

Bees can do it.
Birds can do it.
Lizards can do it.

But not big animals, right? 

Or so we thought. Three weeks ago, Biology Letters delivered the second surprise: “Virgin birth in a hammerhead shark.” A perfectly formed baby shark had appeared in a tank in Nebraska. Tests proved she, too, was a parthenogen.

Why
hadn’t we found parthenogenesis in these animals before? Because we
hadn’t looked. Several sharks have mysteriously reproduced in captivity
in recent years. Scientists now think parthenogenesis is responsible.
Of the two sexually mature female Komodo dragons in Europe, both are
now known to have reproduced this way. Every parthenogenic dragon is
male, which may explain in part why males heavily outnumber females. In snakes, the array of known parthenogenic species continues to grow.

So as it turns out, Komodo Dragons and Sharks can reproduce without a mate. And scientists have known this for a long time, though, they never bothered to tell any of us.

The potential for horror film writers alone is staggering.