A pregnant female stingray, by the name of Charlotte, is due to give birth in the next few weeks.
Charlotte lives in a tank at the Aquarium and Shark lab in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
She will shortly give birth to as many as four pups but experts say that it would have been impossible for her to have mated with any of the five small sharks that share her tank.
She has also not shared a tank with a male of her species in 8 years.
The cause of this strange phenomenon is something called parthenogenesis - a rare type of asexual reproduction in which offspring develop from unfertilised eggs which can occure in some insects, fish, birds, amphibians and reptiles. Some good news... it cant occur in mammals.
What does parthenogenesis mean? When this occurs a female’s egg fuses with another cell, this triggers a cell division and then leads to the creation of an embryo.
Charlotte’s pregnancy is the only documented example of this asexual reproduction in stingrays according to Kady Lyons, a research scientist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. Other kinds of sharks, skates and rays have had these kinds of pregnancies in human care.
By Beat News
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