World's Longest Snake Has Virgin Birth—First Recorded in Species
An 11-year-old reticulated python produced six babies without mating in 2012.
Virgin birth has been documented in the world's longest snake for the first time, a recent study says.
An 11-year-old reticulated python named Thelma produced six female offspring in June 2012 at the Louisville Zoo in Kentucky, where she lives with another female python, Louise. No male had ever slithered anywhere near the 200-pound (91-kilogram), 20-foot-long (6 meters) mother snake.
New DNA evidence, published in July in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, revealed that Thelma is the sole parent, said Bill McMahan, the zoo's curator of ectotherms, or cold-blooded animals. (Read: "'Virgin Birth' Seen in Wild Snakes, Even When Males Are Available.")
"We didn't know what we were seeing. We had attributed it to stored sperm," he said. "I guess
