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All fun and games until they all go extinct because their environment had a slight variation and they could not adapt to it because they're all clones with the same genes
^I'm not a biologist please don't kill me
No, you're right. It's mentioned in the Wikipedia article that lack of genetic diversity is a large concern for obligate parthenogenic animals
Was Jesus a lizard? Exhibit A: Parthenogenesis.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
When lizards do it it's really cool, but then when I have sex with a clone of myself suddenly I'm "weird" and "misusing research funds" and "banned from IKEA"
I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails "a bunch of lesbos" and he wasn't even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/
That study has a great diagram:
Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones
Well, female and male are defined based on their gonads. So yes, these are females because they produce egg cells. There are also animals that have more than two sexes or have sexes that change over time, or that are even weirder. But in all these cases, how we classify their sex is by their gonads.
Philosophically speaking, sex as a category is just a way of abstraction for us to better understand the world. But it is just that, a simplified view on the world, a social construct.
to the lizards - they probably wouldn't call themselves females if they could
to humans - our definition of female is producing the large gamete so if all those lizards do that then, from our human perspective, they're female