Scary Self Cloning...!

Of all the strange things that some animals can do, this has to be the strangest !

For some reason, it bothers me a lot that these guys can clone themselves. Bad enough to have one around, but to find out that it has created six or eight more without help. It wouldn't take long until the dragons outnumbered regular folks. I think we may be in trouble, ya hear?

. Komodo Dragons

In 2006, something astonishing happened: A monitor lizard (aka a Komodo dragon) gave birth to four pups at London Zoo. Even more extraordinary is that another dragon was expecting to give birth to eight additional babies that year.

Both mothers were held in captivity, and both mothers reproduced asexually. Until this point, Komodo dragons had never been known to reproduce without male participation.

After conducting tests on the young males, it was confirmed that the babies were not an exact genetic match with the mother. Instead, the mother’s DNA was doubled to create the young and showed no presence of male DNA.

Herpetologist Richard Gibson speculated that the lizards developed the ability to survive in isolated situations.
Imagine you’re a Komodo dragon and you’re living in an archipelago of tiny islands, and a female gets caught in a storm and swept out to sea, ending up on an island with no other dragons. After two or three years of waiting with no one to breed with, she spontaneously reproduces parthenogenetically.

Gibson added that the ability would eventually cause genetic problems similar to extreme inbreeding, explaining why dragons always treat virgin births as a last resort.

Thank goodness the human animal hasn't learned this trick as of yet. Can you imagine the confusion? Thanks to Listverse for this information!

Coffee out on the slightly chilly patio this morning.