When Pseudosex Is Better Than the Real Thing - Issue 42: Fakes
▻http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/when-pseudosex-is-better-than-the-real-thing
Decades ago, behavioral neurobiologist David Crews read a strange report about the desert grassland whiptail, a small, slender lizard that lives in the sagebrush of the American Southwest. The paper claimed that the species was entirely female, and reproduced by cloning. It tested the limits of what Crews felt to be biologically plausible in higher vertebrates. “I didn’t believe that such a thing existed,” he says. But he was curious, and a friend who was going to New Mexico offered to collect some from the wild. Crews, who at the time was at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, installed a half-dozen whiptail lizards in glass tanks in his animal room. One day, he noticed a lizard biting at her cagemate’s rear legs and tail, and soon after that, riding atop her. Crews instantly (...)