Ed Ricemeyer
speaker
141 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Ed Ricemeyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They're only female fish.
And they all give live birth to clones of themselves.
So the offspring don't have any DNA from another parent.
They are exact copies of the mother.
They haven't evolved for female-female reproduction, but they do make exact copies of themselves.
In a strange twist, they actually still need to be fertilized by sperm.
So they still need to mate with a male.
But there are no males in the species.
So they have to mate with a fish from a different species in order to reproduce.
But then the DNA from the sperm, the sperm fertilizes the egg and triggers it to start growing.
But the DNA doesn't actually end up in the egg.
And so you end up with...
There are about 100 species of vertebrates, specifically, that we know of that reproduce exclusively asexually.
There are a lot more that can kind of reproduce asexually sometimes, but they still have a way to reproduce sexually.
Yeah, there are all sorts of different ways that...
animals can engage in reproduction.
As for the question of specifically whether other of these asexual animals need sperm to reproduce, I don't know the answer to that.
Some people go as far as to call it a parasitic relationship because the males still have to go to the trouble of mating with the female, but then they don't get anything out of it evolutionarily.
How did these fish become asexual then?
So how they started out is they started with hybridization between two different species that live in the same place.
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