A zebra shark has produced babies by “virgin birth” four years in a row

Zebedee is a confined zebra shark in the Burj aAl Arab hotel ’s aquarium in Dubai . It has never met a male shark in its entire animation , and yet for the last four years it has successfully , miraculously produced goodish offspring .

This shark is displaying parthenogeny , which literally means virgin birth . In parthenogeny , embryos develop without being inseminate . While all Zebedee ’s parthogenic small fry must be female , they are n’t clones of their mother as their genes are mixed and recombine in the procreative process .

Many invertebrate species and a variety of vertebrates ( of which shark are one , if they do n’t technically have a backbone any longer ) engage in virgin birth , though this is an highly uncommon phenomenon in sharks , and had only been observed in imprisonment a couple times before . This find is particularly exciting because Zebedee has successfully given birth to healthy partogenic offspring on four unlike occasion , which has never been come across before in sharks .

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David Robinson , the assistant operation managing director at the marine museum , explain that the staff had ab initio assumed Zebedee was plainly laying empty eggs , as there had been no male person to fertilize them . But then they made a singular find :

We were actually moving the eggs and one of the guys mat up something move inside the egg . And we watch the egg with light and there were babies inside . So , it was in reality quite , I do n’t get it on … we went looking for it , but I do n’t recall we were ever expecting to find it . So we ’re just awestruck .

Warren Baverstock , the fish tank ’s conservator , say that it ’s likely other enwrapped shark species possessed this power all along , but it was simply put on that the eggs they pose were duds . This power to procreate even in the everlasting absence seizure of male is probable another example of the noteworthy evolutionary toolkit that the various shark species possess . It ’s also another room in which sharks are completely unstoppable , invincible killing automobile , but I suppose that ’s a passably less scientific opus of analysis .

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