{"id":649662,"date":"2026-03-12T05:54:19","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T05:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/649662\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T05:54:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T05:54:19","slug":"this-fish-has-cloned-itself-for-100000-years-scientists-just-figured-out-how","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/649662\/","title":{"rendered":"This fish has cloned itself for 100,000 years. Scientists just figured out how."},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">(<a class=\"zZygg UbGlr iFzkS qdXbA WCDhQ DbOXS tqUtK GpWVU iJYzE \" data-testid=\"prism-linkbase\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/animals\/article\/parthenogenesis-how-animals-have-virgin-births?loggedin=true&amp;rnd=1773244062335\" target=\"_blank\" dir=\"ltr\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">How some animals have \u2018virgin births\u2019: Parthenogenesis explained<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>Girl power<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">Amazon mollies are small, round-finned fish no bigger than a thumb. Named after the female warrior race from Greek mythology, these fish first appeared around 100,000 years ago after a female Atlantic molly took a liking to a male Sailfin molly. While couplings between members of different species usually produce infertile offspring, this one gave rise to a species capable of giving live birth to carbon copies of itself. These fish do need to have sex with male mollies of other species to trigger their self-cloning, a process known as gynogenesis, but their offspring never carry the DNA of those males.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">When Amazon mollies were discovered in 1932, they were the first vertebrates known to be capable of asexual reproduction. While dozens of vertebrates have since been discovered to possess the same power, including Komodo dragons and hammerhead sharks, Amazon mollies are one of the only vertebrates to do so exclusively.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">How they\u2019ve managed to do so has long been a mystery. According to current models of how genetic mutations accumulate over time in asexual reproduction, Amazon mollies \u201cshould have gone extinct after 10,000 years or so,\u201d says Edward Ricemeyer, computational biologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and co-author of the new study. \u201cThe fact that they have been around for much longer than that presents this paradox.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">Ricemeyer, who was a research scientist at the University of Missouri when he began studying Amazon mollies in 2019, says scientists still don\u2019t know how asexual species, especially complex ones like vertebrates, don\u2019t rack up harmful mutations, given that natural selection isn\u2019t constantly weeding them out.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(How some animals have \u2018virgin births\u2019: Parthenogenesis explained) Girl power Amazon mollies are small, round-finned fish no bigger&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":649663,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[108862,9251,275966,159,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-649662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-cloning","tag-fish","tag-mollies","tag-science","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116214658999978753","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}