If I posted every interesting fact, picture or article I see on National Geographic, my blog would be an exact copy of their website. But every once in a while I see something that is just too good to pass up. While reading about the recent mass bird deaths in Arkansas (turns out they were scared of the fireworks and died from crashing into things... how sad) I came across this article, New Self-Cloning Lizard Found in Vietnam Restaurant.
The title alone screams for ridicule. Eating lizards? Self-cloning food? This could be the wave of the future! Still hungry? No worries! Just wait five minutes and your food will multiply before your eyes! World hunger solved. As long as you like the taste of lizard. Probably tastes like chicken.
The article itself is a hoot too. It goes on to say that this lizard has been showing up on restaurant menus all over Vietnam for ages, but it was an undiscovered species until recently. Now let's get this straight. An entire country has been dining on this little guy (or girl, as it turns out...more on that later) for who knows how long and scientists didn't know the lizard existed? I don't know about you, but that makes me think twice about ordering the General's Surprise next time I'm at Lucky Kitchen. Or at least taking it to my local zoo for testing.
Read on in the article and you'll learn how scientists in the U.S. came to discover this reptile. A Vietnamese herpetologist (a seemingly odd name for someone who studies amphibians and reptiles and not STDs) found live lizards for sale at a restaurant and sent the picture to a father and son herpetologist team in the U.S. to help identify it. After asking the restaurant to hold the reptiles for them and trekking several thousands miles to examine them up close, the duo discovered that some "crazy guy had gotten drunk and served them all to his customers." Don't you hate it when that happens? Luckily several other restaurants stocked them and local children captured them by hand so the herps (that's my new nickname for them) examined around 70 of the lizards and discovered that every single one of them was female.
Yep. Every single one of them was an independent, don't-need-a-man reptilian feminist goddess. Apparently 1% of lizards reproduce by what's called parthenogenesis, meaning the females spontaneously ovulate and clone themselves to produce offspring. Well how do you like that? I'm seeing another scientific breakthrough here, folks. No more sperm donors! No more dead beat dads! The socioeconomic effects would be astounding.
The rest of the article discusses genes and mutations and the viability of a hybrid species, so if you were into the Punnett square in high school, I recommend you read it. I opted to skim through to the end where I learned that all mules are sterile (who knew?) and where I was glad to not have missed the author's (and I use that term loosely) ingenious wrap up to the entire article, "So what you get in the unisexual lizards is a mule that can clone itself."
Uh... yeah.
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