Charlotte, a rust-coloured stingray the size of a serving platter, has spent an awful lot of her life gliding around the confines of a storefront aquarium in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains.
She’s 2,three hundred miles (three,seven hundred kilometers) from her natural habitat under the waves off southern California. and she or he hasn’t shared a tank of water with a male of her species in at least 8 years.
And yet nature has found a way, the aquarium’s owner said: The stingray is pregnant with as many as 4 puppies and will supply birth within the subsequent weeks.
“right here’s our female announcing, ’hello, satisfied Valentine’s Day! allow’s have some domestic dogs!” stated Brenda Ramer, executive director of the Aquarium and Shark Lab on primary avenue in downtown Hendersonville.
An professional at the stingrays said it'd had been impossible for Charlotte to have mated with one of the five small sharks that proportion her tank, notwithstanding information reports suggesting that was the case after Ramer joked about a likely interspecies hookup.
The small aquarium is run with the aid of Ramer’s instructional nonprofit, group ECCO, which inspires nearby schoolchildren and others to take an interest in technological know-how.
Its biggest lesson now is at the procedure of parthenogenesis: a form of asexual duplicate in which offspring expand from unfertilized eggs, meaning there is no genetic contribution by means of a male.
The basically rare phenomenon can arise in a few bugs, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, however no longer mammals. Documented examples have included California condors, Komodo dragons and yellow-bellied water snakes.
Kady Lyons, a studies scientist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta who isn't involved with the North Carolina aquarium, stated Charlotte’s pregnancy is the handiest documented example she’s aware about for this species, round stingrays.
however Lyons isn’t at all shocked. other sorts of sharks, skates and rays — a trio of animals frequently grouped collectively — have had those kinds of pregnancies in human care.
“I’m no longer amazed, due to the fact nature reveals a manner of getting this show up,” she said.
To be clear, Lyons stated, those animals aren't cloning themselves. alternatively, a woman’s egg fuses with another cellular, triggers mobile department and leads to the introduction of an embryo.
The cell that fuses with the egg is called a polar body. they are produced when a female is creating an egg but normally aren’t used.
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