all girl lizards

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A lizard previously unknown and undescribed by science was recently discovered in a restaurant in South Vietnam.

Where? On the menu. The common reptile is a popular Vietnamese entrée but apparently no biologist had ever tried to figure out what he or she was eating. (I normally do not take my field guides into restaurants either.)

But, wait, there's more. It gets even more curious.

Newly named Leiolepis ngovantrii (in the Vietnamese: Nhông cát trinh sản, meaning "parthenogenic sand iguana") is all female. The specific name honors Vietnamese herpetologist Ngo Van Tri. The all-girl lizard reproduces by cloning and do not need males. If this strategy spreads, my gender is in trouble. Better clean up your act boys!

But how can this be? 

In a paper titled "Who's your Mommy?" written by Jesse and Lee Grismer and published in the scientific journal Zootaxa, the Grismers speculate: "Two major pathways that have been proposed for the origin of this reproductive lifestyle within vertebrates are (1) a genetic mutation (usually within a single egg clutch) that creates individuals with the ability to clone themselves and (2) two species (either two sexual species or an asexual and a sexual species) hybridize to create a polyploidal [having more than twice the basic number of chromosomes], all-female population whose members have the ability to clone themselves." 

Just so you know. Every daughter and all of her sisters are a carbon copies of their mother. 

Photo by the paper's co-author Lee Grismer. 

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