SoMAS professor Demian Chapman was recently featured in a BBC Earth article regarding the rise of virgin births in many different species. An excerpt is below.
On the 14 December 2001, for example, one of three captive adult female bonnethead sharks gave birth to a healthy female pup. Each of the prospective mothers had been caught as immature fish from the wild waters of the Florida Keys, US.
None had met a male shark, and all were virgins.
Yet one of them had clearly given birth, reported a team led by Demian Chapman of Stony Brook University, in New York state, US.
Later genetic tests confirmed that no males had been involved, and since then the same has been discovered in four other shark species. “It seems to be something a wide variety of sharks can do,” Chapman told BBC Earth.
