I'm neither against homosexuals per say nor a troll
*
but that title invites a clear response :
Hindu gods are Freaks !
Good thread better day, Tay.
* I am a bit of a jester though.
you need to look to nature for answer.
There are no freaks in nature just our understanding of nature is very limited. If you are the last human on the planet , nature might take pity on human race and help you to.....you know what rt?
A female shark had a bunch of babies without male contact
It's not the first time a female animal has taken matters into her own fins
By
Rachel Feltman January 17, 2017
It's a stop-gap solution.
Biodiversity heritage library
It's a tale as old as time: Boy meets girl, boy and girl make babies, boy goes away, girl just keeps having babies, sperm-be-damned. While Leonie the zebra shark can't quite claim a "virgin birth"—she had a couple dozen pups with a male partner in the early 2000s—scientists
have confirmed that the three babies she made in 2016 were a total inside job. Without any genetic contributions from a male partner, Leonie got pregnant and had three healthy pups.
Parthenogenesis—asexual reproduction in a female—has been seen in other animals before, though it's rare enough to cause a bit of a stir whenever it's caught on the record. But scientists are especially excited about Leonie's case: As researchers reported this week in
Scientific Reports, she's the first shark ever known to have switched from sexual reproduction to asexual. This duality shows that Leonie really did adapt to her circumstances—she wasn't some fluke of an asexual being; she had pups the usual way but took matters into her own hands when males got scarce.
That's a switch that scientists rarely get to observe, and one they don't really understand very well: In one of the two other known cases, a female eagle ray switched from sexual reproduction to producing a pup asexually less than one year after being separated from her male partner—which seems like an awfully short grieving period. The other case was even stranger, with a female boa constrictor giving birth to parthenogenic pups
after reproducing sexually
and while there were
males available for her to mate with.
But while the exact mechanism of this sexual switch is still mysterious, it's clearly an ingenious evolutionary strategy—even if it's only a short-term solution. After all, the extreme lack of genetic variety will make a population more vulnerable to dangerous mutations, and slower to adapt to new environmental circumstances. It's also likely that Leonie's solo offspring will be asexual reproducers themselves,
which would limit their longterm usefulness in the gene pool. Being a literal single mother gets old after a generation or two, so male tiger sharks needn't worry that they might become obsolete.
“It might be a holding-on mechanism,” study author Christine Dudgeon at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia
told New Scientist. “Mum’s genes get passed down from female to female until there are males available to mate with.”
The zebra shark fossil record shows evidence of several population bottlenecks (sharp reductions in the population) associated with ice ages. Perhaps, Dudgeon and her colleagues
write in the study, the ancestors of today's zebra sharks were able to hold out longer than some of their cousins by squeezing out a few extra generations of female clones. Since zebra sharks are now listed as endangered, it's heartening to see evidence that they might have a few tricks up their sleeves—even if scientists still don't know how or when this astounding reproduction might occur.
