How Animals Have Sex by Gideon Defoe

Author:Gideon Defoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2004-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

30. Whiptail Lizard

. Scientific name: Cnemidophorus uniparens

Classification: Phylum: Chordata, Class: Reptilia, Order: Squamata, Family: Teiidae

Size: 15-23cm

Distribution: California, Arizona

Diet: Insects

The position of men often seems precarious. Testosterone slowly poisons us, and our stunned Y-chromosome is rapidly falling to bits. We’re one collective no-really,-l-just-think-of-you-like-a-brother away from mass extinction.

Some species have taken that plunge already. Whiptail lizards used to have men, now they don’t, and it’s as simple as that. The females all immaculately conceive, giving birth to perfect clones of themselves. Though perhaps as an overhang from their more sexual past, the lady lizards still engage in bouts of pseudocopulation. That is, one of them pretends to be the man lizard and mounts the female. They go through all the motions of sex, bumping happily away, even though nothing is actually going on down there. Then they switch around. For some unknown reason they still seem to need to do this in order to stimulate egg production.

The trouble is, clones aren’t that great. I know they sound all shiny and futuristic. And you’re probably thinking how useful it would be to have a clone of your own, so that you could hatch those schemes where you win a marathon by having the clone take over halfway through. But in the long term almost every species that has tried giving up sex tends to go extinct after a few hundred generations. Cloning is certainly less bother than finding a partner, impressing them and convincing them to have sex with you, but without the regular recombination of our genes you just end up standing still whilst the rest of the world – ie diseases and that – overtake you. It’s like Madonna: if she’d kept those big bushy eyebrows she had back in the 80s, would she have had a twenty-year career? She would not. She had to reinvent herself on an almost annual basis just to keep up. In the end, clones quickly become the equivalent of some mad old retired colonel, waving his copy of the Telegraph and shouting about how not enough stuff is made out of bakelite nowadays.

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