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

Jesus

[backslashdot]

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

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.

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.