I thought I remembered the article on the Burmese case mentioning that it was unusual that she was making female clones of herself. I thought it said that most other cases of parthenogenesis in snakes produced only males by doubling up half the female's chromosomes to make a fully homozygous animal. Since snake gender is zz male and zw female the double up method only makes zz males as ww is invalid and don't survive.

Amazing that snakes could have two totally different methods of parthenogenesis. Hopefully DNA testing will become available to the point that we can figure out how often this happens. Does it even happen when males are present? Could explain some of the reported cases of homozygous co-dominant males producing normals if there really isn’t always a father.

[ Show Entire Thread ]