REAL COOL STORIES (week ended 2/24/24)

REAL COOL STORIES (week ended 2/24/24)

An interesting story this week out of Hendersonville, North Carolina.  A female round stingray named Charlotte at the Aquarium & Shark Lab showed signs of being pregnant.  Why is it a story?  Well, there are no male stingrays in the tank at the aquarium.

So, what happened? Well, the internet was wild with ideas including that a male shark provided the sperm.  According to Kady Lyons, a research scientist at the Georgia Aquarium, this sort of interspecies copulation is not biologically possible.

There’s another explanation for Charlotte’s impending motherhood, though, and it’s not much less weird: she almost certainly impregnated herself, a phenomenon known as parthenogenesis.

Researchers don’t fully understand why parthenogenesis happens or what triggers it. Here’s how the process works: Inside the female’s body, cell division creates sex cells, or gametes. That division, called meiosis, results in the egg, which can eventually be fertilized by a sperm, and three extra cells called polar bodies. The egg and each polar body each contain half of the complement of genes needed to make a new organism. In parthenogenesis, a polar body fuses with the unfertilized egg, triggering it to form an embryo.

Even so, Charlotte’s pregnancy is no less remarkable — she is the only known case of her species to become pregnant by parthenogenesis.

You can follow the facebook page for the Aquarium & Shark Lab at:  https://www.facebook.com/teamecco/

A real cool, story indeed!