The first report of asexual reproduction in California condors | Hacker News Reader

The first report of asexual reproduction in California condors

apnews.com

76 pointsbryan017 comments

Believe it or not, this actually isn't all that uncommon in birds. Certain types of turkeys and chickens will exhibit parthenogenesis ("virgin birth") somewhat frequently.

https://rep.bioscientifica.com/view/journals/rep/155/6/REP-1...

It's called parthenogenesis.[0] While it might not be super uncommon in certain types of turkeys, it's extremely rare overall for birds. It is a lot more common in fish, amphibians, and reptiles however. Given that it's been well-observed in reptiles, it makes me wonder how much it might actually be happening in birds and we've just been failing to observe it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis

Also here's the actual study: https://academic.oup.com/jhered/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...

Perhaps it's harder to detect because birds with their ZW sex chromosomes can produce both male and female offspring, whereas other species with XY chromosomes would only produce females, e.g. the "lesbian lizards".

So, we very easily notice cases of parthenogenisis if we see an imbalance of the sexes in a population, but we that wouldn't happen in birds so we don't notice until we sequence the DNA.

I was wondering how a female generated male genetic data. Bird sex chromosomes are fuzzier than I expected. https://genetics.thetech.org/original_news/news115

It now very fuzzy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system Simplifying, they have the ZW system where the ZZ are males and the ZW are females. (As in the mammalian cases, there are some exceptions and cases where the number of genes is different from 2.) The article you posted discuss too much about how the ZZ or ZW determines the sex, and IIUC it's still not clear if the W induce the femaleness or the double Z induces maleness or what is happening, but the main idea that distinguish the ZW system and the XY system is simple.

Can we update the link to point to the actual release from San Diego Zoo? https://sandiegozoowildlifealliance.org/pr/CondorParthenogen...

>In this case, each mother condor had previously bred with males, producing 34 chicks, and each was housed with a fertile male at the time they produced the eggs through parthenogenesis.

>The researchers said they believe it is the first case of asexual reproduction in any avian species where the female had access to a mate.

Do they store some sort of marker? Both were male, reminiscent of the insect family of hymenoptera which produces male drones with no fertilization?

> The asexual reproduction was discovered some years ago during widespread testing of genetic material collected over decades from condors, both living and dead, in breeding programs and in the wild.

They just made a standard DNA paternity test, and got a surprise.

Life finds a way!

Came here to say this lol

*Life, uh, finds a way.

Indeed, even if it seems that life doesn't actually 100% need to.

Not so much finding a way as more not waiting around.

Ian Malcom was right!

This is how baby Jesus was born.

Condors are not raptors.

Yes, they are. All the New-World Vultures (Cathartidae) are in the order Accipitriformes[1].

[1] Chesser, R. T., R. C. Banks, F. K. Barker, C. Cicero, J. L. Dunn, A. W. Kratter, I. J. Lovette, P. C. Rasmussen, J. V. Remsen Jr., J. D. Rising, D. F. Stotz, and K. Winker (2010). Fifty-first supplement to the American Ornithologists' Union Check-list of North American Birds. Auk 127: 726–744.

Parthenogenesis in mammals can result only in an XX sex genome pairing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com