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Reptile & Amphibian
News Blog Keep up with news and features of interest to the reptile and amphibian community on the kingsnake.com blog. We cover breaking stories from the mainstream and scientific media, user-submitted photos and videos, and feature articles and photos by Jeff Barringer, Richard Bartlett, and other herpetologists and herpetoculturists.
Saturday, September 25 2010Parthenogenetic Boa Constrictor
The captive breeding in the Boa world is providing study data for the scientific community. A supremely beautiful Female Ghost Boa was bred this season with a Dominant or co-dominant pattern mutation Key West Boa. This female had the most massive ovulation I had this past season.
 Her mate was this proven Key West Boa.  Together we expected them to make a wonderful litter of baby Boas that would all be het for Anerythristic. Half of those babies should have been Key West Boas and half of those would have been Hypo Key West Boas. However, the results were astounding. There were 19 babies total. Zero Key Wests among them. In fact the entire litter consisted of Anerythristic and Ghost Boas. In fact, all the babies are female as well pointing to the possibility of a Parthenogenetic litter.  Six of the offspring were either stillborn or deformed. They along with shed skin samples are being collected to send to Dr. Warren Booth who will do genetic analysis of the tissues to determine if in fact, as suspected, if this female produced these babies without a contribution from a male. This is a science experiment in the making. 
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Yes, more specifically (I hope): A lethal genetic trait expressed either directly in a ZZ combination, or secondary via an associated autosomal anomality within the genic balance mechanism.
K
Three possible ways a female could produce viable offspring without a male in the ZW/ZZ chromosome system:
1. Meiosis occurs normally, haploid gametes undergo terminal fusion resulting in either WW or ZZ (offspring inheriting two copies of 1/2 of the mother's genome). Since WW is non-viable, all offspring will be male and obviously not clones of mom (documented in birds and Varanids).
2. Meiosis occurs normally, haploid gametes undergo central fusion, resulting in ZW. All offspring will therefore be female, and even though they inherit the complete maternal genome, they will not be exact copies of the mother due to "crossing over". Plausible in this case given two phenotypes (ghost and anerythristic) were expressed in the litter.
3. Pre-meiotic chromosomal doubling occurs so that the 4 resulting gametes would be diploid (instead of the usual haploid) and exact copies of the maternal genotype. The fact that the litter contained two phenotypes suggests this is not the case here.
I'll post this with a diagram over in the boa forum.
How was retained sperm ruled out?