Parthenogenesis... who knew??

When we were 16 or 17 years old, my friend Kristel and I went down to a (now defunct) pet store on Marine Drive in North Vancouver and bought two stick insects each. Each were 50 cents, about an inch long, and very cute. We placed our little stick insect babies in empty jam jars with holes punched into the lid for air, inserted a twig for climbing, a few leaves for food, and went home with them. A low maintenance pet, we thought.

Every day I stared into the jar watching as they munched on fresh leaves and grew. And they grew big. An adult stick insect was just over 3 inches long. And ugly. Boy, were they ugly. But they were fun to take out and let crawl around my palm.

Disaster presented itself very soon after the purchase of the phasmatodea. The problem was that every couple of days, baby stick insects would hatch. Perfect miniatures of the two I'd purchased. I was unfortunate enough to have purchase a male and female breeding pair of stick bugs. Two turned into ten, which turned into twenty, which turned into a hundred, which turned into hundreds. And I mean HUNDREDS. There were so many stick bugs in that jar that I couldn't open the jar to give them leaves anymore for fear that they would overflow and pour into our apartment like a Plague of Egypt. In the end, I shamefully stuck the jar on the balcony so as to not witness the death of all those poor stick insects. Equally unfortunate enough to have purchased a breeding pair, poor Kristel ended up with Moses's Locusts. I believe she and her family were stepping on them all over the house for days.

We never bought them again.

Just now I was surfing the net, aimlessly following link after link while hitting my head trying to decide what to do with my life, when I came across a study of the evolution of asexuality in walking stick insects.

WHAT???

I went to the ever-useful google.com and googled "Stick insect asexual" and it spat out some link to the San Diego Zoo Animal Byte's page, which in turn spat this sentence out at me: One of the most interesting things about stick insects is their ability to reproduce parthenogenetically. This is a form of asexual reproduction where the unfertilized females produce eggs that hatch into females.

WHAT???

I then went to the equally useful Wikipedia.org and typed in "Parthenogenesis" and found out that my stick insects did not necessarily need a male stick insect to reproduce. There is no way to tell, but I could have had 400 female stick insects dying in that jar. Even if I did have a breeding pair, it would explain why they reproduced twice as fast! I also found out that parthenogenesis occurs in a bunch of other invertebrates, some reptiles, a few fish, a couple sharks, and even turkeys! BIRDS! And apparently, artificially induced in a mouse.

Hear that! A Komodo dragon does not need a daddy.

It turns out that of the 300 species of stick insects raised in captivity, the most common is the Indian or Laboratory stick insect (Carausius morosus). And they reproduce parthenogenetically...

The things I should have known when I was 16.