Shark deprived of her mate turns asexual

• Autores: Alice Klein
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3109, 2017, pág. 9
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • A female shark has had babies on her own years after being separated from her long-term mate. It's a rare case of an animal switching from sexual to asexual reproduction. Leonie the zebra shark (Stegostoma fasciatum) met her male partner at an aquarium in Townsville, Australia, in 1999. They had more than two dozen offspring before he was moved to another tank in 2012. From then on, Leonie had no male contact. Then in early 2016, she had three baby sharks. Intrigued, Christine Dudgeon at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and her colleagues began fishing for answers. One possibility was that Leonie had been storing sperm. But tests showed that the young only had DNA from their mum, so were the result of an ability some sharks are known to have: reproducing asexually.