Cool Article - Virgin Snake Births For Copperheads And Cotton Mouths

[mic]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=virgin-births-seen-in-wild-vipers

[Justin Spencer]

Great, now women might not even need us for this.

[jdmidwest]

Bees and sharks are a few that I know that have been known to have virgin births also. In a bee colony, if something happens to a mated queen which is the only egglayer, other worker bees that are female will start laying eggs that were never fertilized by a mail. The resulting brood will be worthless drones and the colony will be doomed.

2 sex reproduction is just a way of passing genes around. Virgin birth only duplicates the genes of the mother, if gene code gets damaged, that will lead to the death of the species.

[Feathers and Fins]

Its happened before, Also speculation of sperm retention from mating years prior to the births. All from live bearing species.

[jdmidwest]

But the presence of sperm does not support "virgin birth". There is some speculation of sperm retention in some species. Many species mate only once and propogate on the one mating. Birds do it as well as others.

[Haris122]

Interesting read. Hopefully prior sperm retention wasn't just overlooked in that, cause that would kind of seem like an obvious thing to doublecheck.

[Feathers and Fins]

Jd, I had a cottonmouth I collected in 2005 that was approx 22'' long, I never breed it and in 2007 she dropped 6 babies. I had no clue of her age and only kept her because she was extremly blond in coloration and hoped one day to breed her to a male if icould find one that light, the only conclusion was she had been breed at one time and retained the sperm.

All the neo's were very dark and last pictures I saw of one that a friend got showed it still very dark. I have never seen and to my knowledge dont know of it occurring in egg laying species of snakes. wish it would have i lost many coral snakes in breeding when one ate the other.