Have you ever heard predictions that one day women will be able to have babies without men? It turns out that some species of the Whiptail lizard have figured out how to do this and completely eliminated the male sex.
你是否曾听说过某一天女性将不需要男性也可生小孩?事实上一些种类的长尾蜥蜴已经可以做到这一点,并将全部的雄性完全消灭掉了。
Females Cloning Themselves
雌性克隆自身
The females have the ability to lay eggs that hatch and grow into healthy lizards without needing to be fertilized by a male. The offspring are exact and complete genetic duplicates of the mothers.
无须借助雄性受孕,雌性蜥蜴有能力产下可以孵化出健康的小蜥蜴的蛋。其后代完全是母亲们基因的复制品。
Essentially the females are clonnig themselves.
这在本质上是雌性在克隆自己。
Role Playing
角色扮演
If that weren’t enough, the female lizards take turns role-playing. They perform a mating ritual in which one lizard acts like the male, and the second lizard acts like the female. The ritual causes the lizard acting as the female to ovulate and lay her eggs. Then, a few weeks later, the two lizards switch roles and repeat this process so that the second female will be able to ovulate and lay her eggs.
如果这还不够的话,雌性蜥蜴会轮流扮演角色。她们在交配过程中,一只扮演雄性,另一只扮演雌性。交配将使扮演雌性的蜥蜴排卵产蛋。几周之后,两只蜥蜴互换角色重复交配过程从而使得另一只雌性得以排卵。
Genetic Variation
遗传变异
It raises a lot of interesting questions. For example, it’s not clear how well an all female species can evolve and adapt to environmental changes. A species’ survival depends in part on variation among its members. If all the members of a species are identical, chances are greater that something like a change in the climate or a disease will wipe them all out.
这引发了许多有意思的问题。例如,我们尚不清楚一个完全由雌性组成的种群在面临环境变化是能否很好地适应和进化。一个种群的存在,部分地取决于其内部成员的多样性。如果一个种群中所有的成员具有同一性,那么当环境剧变或疾病肆虐时,它们的灭绝概率也将更大。
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