- The reproductive cycles of certain lizards.
- Under certain conditions, external or internal, certain species of lizards or perhaps all of them have the ability for the females of said species to reproduce without the need of a male to fertilize their eggs. This strange thing that female lizards can do seems to be a response to certain conditions found within their environments. If there happens to be a lack of males to mate and fertilize eggs with, as a survival strategy to ensure the safety of the population of their species, female lizards will still lay eggs that hatch into fully formed and healthy newborn lizards. These newborns are direct clones of the lizard that laid the eggs and thus are all females.
- I want to what species of reptile or lizard have this ability to procreate without sexual reproduction, what are the conditions necessary for this event to occur, why does it happen, is it a safe and effective means of prolonging the survival of a species, how did this ability come about to begin with and when did lizards and other organisms gain the ability to reproduce asexually?
- So apparently, it has been discovered thus far that about 70 species of vertebrates have this ability to reproduce asexually from a process called parthenogenesis, and it isn’t limited to only lizards. The offspring are usually direct clones of their mother, but the organisms do have a way of producing genetically diverse offspring without the aid of a male. During the cellular division process called meiosis, the daughter cells acquire twice the usual amount of chromosomes and are able to get a full set of chromosomes from two sets of pairs derived from the mother. This allows the offspring to be fully genetically diverse from the mother it was born form and thus protect the population’s genetic diversity.
- I still want to know how these few vertebrates gained the ability to reproduce asexually, when did this occur, and what are the trigger conditions for this event to take place. Why is this ability to asexually reproduce present in several species of vertebrates that don’t have any relation to each other, and why do so few in general have the capacity to do this?
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