Interesting article in the NYTimes today. In my advanced bio class in high school, we pricked frog eggs with rusty nails to “fertilize” them. It worked, but the nail had to be rusty (could this be nature’s comment on old pricks?).
The author makes a point that I’ve been thinking about for awhile now–that with the push to clone food, both animal and vegetable, in order to get a “consistent” product, it is obvious that this method is flawed. It is flawed because we are working directly against nature. All life thrives on diversity in order to be able to adapt to change. The shortsighted efforts of the food industry to manipulate through cloning will come back to bite us in the not so distant future.
Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don’t Need To.
By NEIL SHUBIN
Published: February 24, 2008
Chicago
DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion. Except, that is, in Kansas, where they have recently come together in a way that should alter the way many of us look at nature and demonstrate the risks in our habit of using it to help us make ethical decisions.
Keepers at Wichita’s zoo got a surprise last year when they found developing eggs inside the Komodo dragon compound. Komodos are large rapacious lizards naturally found in Indonesia, but increasingly populating zoos around the world. Finding fertile embryos of dragons is a joyous occasion — there are only a few thousand of the lizards in the wild and captive breeding may be the only way to keep the species around.
But these eggs — two of which hatched a few weeks ago — were unusual: they developed from a female that had had no male of the species in close proximity for more than a decade. Judging from similar occurrences over the past two years in Britain, it appears that these lizards sometimes use a form of virgin birth in which eggs hatch without conception. The embryos are genetic clones of the mother.
Komodos — like many fish, amphibians and reptiles — have lots of reproductive tricks. For example, females can store sperm for a long time, tiding them over when conditions may be poor for reproduction. It’s possible that the Wichita dragon eggs could have been fertilized by the sperm from a male that was on site a long time ago. But DNA analysis of the “miracle embryos” from Britain showed that every bit of their DNA came from the females, and nobody should be surprised if this is also true of the Kansas dragons.
the rest can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24shubin.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Croneswood Art 