Scientists Discover Sawfish Escape Extinction Through "Virgin Births"

An anonymous reader writes: The first known virgin births in smalltooth sawfish have been documented in the wild. Researchers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission used DNA to show that three percent of a Florida sawfish population was created by female-only reproduction. Dr Warren Booth, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tulsa, who previously discovered an instance of parthenogenesis in snakes, said: "This is basically a very extreme form of inbreeding. Most people think of inbreeding as bad, but it could be helpful in purging deleterious mutations from a population." The findings were published in the journal Current Biology.

Comments

dear lord

[Anonymous Coward]

keep this away from the 4chan crowd

Jesus

[backslashdot]

Sawfish must be a lot smarter than humans since they didn't form a nonsensical religion around it.

Re:Jesus

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The title needlessly brought in "virgin birth". There are other scientific terms, like asexual reproduction, parthenogenesis etc. So take your beef to the editors needlessly adding a religious color to some innocuous scientific observation.

Also I have been around enough theists who would take a random scientific fact and argue it was predicted in scriptures. "Koran has referenced this fact of embryology" "Bible has always known the world was round" "The Manduk Upanishad has a verse describing the Schrodinger's Equation" "The fundamental particles electron, proton and neutron represent the Holy Trinity" "The Shaivaite philosophy that holds the dance of Shiva permeates the universe and is the fundamental cosmic energy is same as molecular vibrations providing temperature/heat energy in thermodynamics".

Score card?

The atheists are woefully outclassed by theists when it comes to linking random collection of (often inconsistent) scientific facts to religious principles to bolster their point of view.

Re:Jesus

[argStyopa]

And you know this how?

On a serious note, I'm not even a particularly religious person, but there's not a single human society in existence (or even historically documented) that didn't develop religion of some sort. To me that would suggest that there's some long-term survival advantage.

Further, there are still boundaries to what science knows and always will be. The WHY questions, as opposed to the HOWs. As a mechanism of cultural psychology, I don't see a problem with religion attempting to give people a method to approach those questions.

Of course, as a postmodern western American, I find that religion that becomes pre- and proscriptive is oppressive and frankly obnoxious. But to throw out the baby with the bathwater by flat-out criticizing faith is overstepping pretty far.

Dear lord...

[SeaFox]

I read that headline as "Scientists Discover Swedish Escape Extinction Through 'Virgin Births'" and thought I was about to read something truly interesting about pre-historic Nordic humans surviving during the Ice Age.

inbreeding beneficial?

[binarstu]

From TFA summary:

Dr Warren Booth, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tulsa, who previously discovered an instance of parthenogenesis in snakes, said: "This is basically a very extreme form of inbreeding. Most people think of inbreeding as bad, but it could be helpful in purging deleterious mutations from a population."

Most people think of inbreeding as bad, because it almost always is bad. Inbreeding depression is a very well documented, and well understood, phenomenon that can increase the extinction risk of critically endangered species. The idea that inbreeding can somehow be "helpful in purging deleterious mutations" has been discussed before, but a recent study found that even if small (e.g., endangered) populations are actively managed to control both inbreeding and outbreeding, the negative effects of inbreeding depression generally outweigh the benefits of removing harmful alleles. And that is a best case scenario, with reproduction carefully controlled to produce an optimal genetic outcome, which obviously does not happen naturally.

For these sawfish, asexual reproduction is most likely a desperation strategy used when the population has gotten so small that it is difficult or impossible to find mates. It is extremely unlikely that it will somehow improve the population's genetic fitness; more likely, it will lead to further decreases in genetic diversity and a corresponding loss of overall fitness.

Re:inbreeding beneficial?

[Trailer Trash]

For these sawfish, asexual reproduction is most likely a desperation strategy used when the population has gotten so small that it is difficult or impossible to find mates. It is extremely unlikely that it will somehow improve the population's genetic fitness; more likely, it will lead to further decreases in genetic diversity and a corresponding loss of overall fitness.

I would point out furthermore that inbreeding and asexual reproduction have nothing to do with each other. It's unrelated. The problem with inbreeding is that you can get two copies of a single chromosome quite easily, and rare genetic diseases that appear only when the same gene is present on both chromosomes in a pair suddenly start popping up more often.

That's not an issue with asexual reproduction. It might at some point become an issue if the genetic diversity of the group becomes lesser, but that would be down the road somewhere.

Re:Atheists are believers

[znrt]

Agnostics are actually worse to be around when attempting to have a religious debate, as the superiority complex which comes with "anything is possible" is utterly infuriating to debate.

believe me, you would have a hard time debating with someone who seriously insists he (and everything around him) was created by a flying spaghetti monster, although you can't prove that's impossible.

"I win because I don't need to assert anything".

if you want to assert bullshit like "a woman spontaneously conceived the son of god" then that's your problem, pal. and i've no problem at all with the crap you may believe, as long as you don't want me to behave according to your beliefs. be rational, or forget about being taken seriously.