Professor Michael Kearney

But it's actually a much simpler life to just have one sex that produces offspring that are just the same as themselves.

You don't have to find a mate, no problem with inbreeding, no sexually transmitted diseases.

It's actually a much simpler way to be.

It's a kind of grasshopper called a matchstick grasshopper, so that gives you an idea of what it looks like.

It's quite colourful.

It's green, but it's got yellow lines down its back and its face is painted with markings.

Most grasshoppers will mate before they lay eggs.

But this particular one doesn't mate at all.

They're all female and they spontaneously produce eggs, put their eggs in the ground and out of those eggs hop little clones of themselves.

They've just done a very special thing with the way they make their eggs that allows them to do this trick of all-female reproduction and cloning.

Oh, the trick.

It's to do with meiosis.

So this might take you back to high school biology, but meiosis is the cell divisions that produce the sex cells, so the eggs or the sperm.

So the sperm and egg cells have half the normal number, and when the fertilisation happens, it goes back up to the normal number.

What these grasshoppers do...

is they double their chromosomes before they do meiosis.

And then they just do a completely normal meiosis.

And then they can turn into a grasshopper that's got exactly the same genes as the mother.

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