Today’s weird animal is a local: The New Mexico Whiptail Lizard. I see them often when I go for walks on the sunny side of the Sandias, or around the volcanoes. All in all, they’re actually pretty normal lizards. They enjoy eating insects, and sunning themselves on rocks. Only the females have something rather odd about them. The one pictured below is a female.

How do I know it’s a female? Because they’re all female. All of them. All their lives. Male New Mexico Whiptail Lizards no longer exist. So how do they reproduce? It’s called parthenogenesis, and it’s responsible for all those virgin births you occasionally hear about. It’s not quite cloning; the female’s DNA simply recombines with itself during meiosis, so each daughter is slightly (but only slightly) different from her mother. Oh, and I should point out that while it’s not absolutely necessary that two female whiptails simulate the act of copulation in order to conceive, studies have shown that it sure helps.

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