#parthenogenetic

[kirstielol]

so, someone studying microbiology & genetics at guelph university contacted me, and they want me to send them some dna (in the form of shed skin) from kiwi & her partho baby so they can add it to their "genome database"! even they were talking about how incredibly rare this is!

and like personally, i can hardly find ANY information on parthenogenesis in crested geckos. searching on google brings up nothing except a few instances of people having a partho egg that never hatched. there are a total of 3 videos on youtube of this happening to someone, two by the same person and the gecko was born with an eye deformity, then one random video from like 6 years ago with no updates. i searched on instagram and found 1 video from 3 years ago.. again with 0 updates. i posted on reddit where my post blew up on the crested gecko reddit, had 2 people comment that this happened to them.. one of them the gecko was born with a very bad deformity and lived for only a few months, and one person who says their partho baby is 5 months old and still doing well! so far that's been the ONLY source i can find of someone else having a partho baby that's survived, and theirs isn't even an adult yet.

[queruloustea]

i got asked about Quirrel Beforetimes Dad (Mom) Shenanigans the other day, thought i would share the extra doodle i did as well <33

one must imagine the little creature very displeased

[eon-bug-collection]

would you look at the time... it's weevil.

[podcast-hemocytoblast]

At least two species within the goblin spider family (family Oonopidae) — Heteroonops spinimanus and Triaeris stenaspis, in case anyone is wondering — are believed to be parthenogenetic (in other words, they can develop an embryo from an unfertilized egg). So, with this in mind, do y’all think there’s ever been some unlucky Web Avatar out there who went to a routine appointment at the gynecologist only to get the news that they’re the next Virgin Mary and they’re gonna give birth to Web Jesus?

[miragemirrors]

necrofriggians are probably like the lesbian lizards of space but cold moths

[txttletale]

more generally this kind of hypocrisy is inherent to all these tme pepole who idolize the (cis) usamerican queer cultures of the 70s and 80s as the uncontested pinnacle of queerness. whatever problematic kink du jour is Sexualizing Abuse and therefore Evil--just don't ask them what pup hoods or leather 'daddies' and their 'boys' or whips and chains or especially all those peaked caps in all the black and white photos they reblog are meant to be sexualizing! those are all inert floating signifiers that popped forth parthenogenetically as a communal Gay Egregore with no meaning or connotations outside that, dontcha know

[ultralaser]

ponder the orb, for from the orb we came and to the orb we shall return

[herpsandbirds]

Last weekend I took my 6-year old niece to a reptile center to look at a whole bunch of snakes, lizards, spiders and so on. We both really enjoyed it and one of the lizards was this parthenogenetically born monitor! She posed for us in her pool and was adorable. She is a Varanus s. komaini monitor lizard, btw!

What a pretty baby!

[kirstielol]

Also I moved Peach into a much bigger tank!! I'll have to see how she does in here.. idk if I've mentioned this here before but Peach has a back deformity and can't jump very well. She can climb just fine though so 🤞

[homeric-hymnist]

hera voice divorce isn't enough i need to parthenogenetically birth a monster that rivals his ass

[bestanimal]

Round 2 - Arthropoda - Ostracoda

(Sources - 1, 2, 3, 4)

Ostracoda are a class of crustaceans commonly known as “Seed Shrimp,” grouped into 7 orders. Ostracods are unique among crustaceans for their carapace which consists of two valves, superficially resembling the shell of a tiny clam.

Ostracods live in both freshwater and marine environments, and some even live in humid soils. Most live either as plankton or in sediment. The ostracod body is not clearly divided into segments, consisting of a head and thorax region. Their head has two pairs of well-developed antennae that are used to swim through water, a pair of mandibles, and a pair of maxillae. The thorax has three main appendages. The first pair’s function varies between species. It can be used for feeding, for walking, or for mating. The second pair is mainly used for locomotion, and the third is used for walking or cleaning, and it is reduced or absent in some species. Ostracods sense the world around them via sensitive hairs on their bodies and appendages, though the order Myodocopina also has compound eyes, and the Podocopids have simple eyes as larvae. They have a wide variety of diets and can be carnivores, herbivores, or scavengers, though most are filter feeders.

Male ostracods have two penises, corresponding to two genital openings (gonopores) on the female. Mating often occurs in a swarm, with large groups of females joining large groups of males. Some species are wholly or partially parthenogenetic, consisting almost entirely of females. Some species care for their young, releasing them after their first moult, some release their eggs directly into the water, while others glue their eggs to vegetation or a firm surface. Glued eggs often do not hatch until conditions are favorable. Larvae add on more legs with each moult until achieving their adult form.

Propaganda under the cut:

Giant Ostracods, the genus Gigantocypris (image 3), live in deep, cold oceans. They can get up to 3.2 cm (1.3 in) across, which is enormous for an ostracod. They use their large, mirror-like eyes to locate small prey.

Ostracod sperm is huge, sometimes up to six times the length of the male ostracod itself! They are usually coiled up within the testis prior to mating.

Some ostracods, such as Vargula hilgendorfii, are bioluminescent. These ostracods are called "blue sand" or "blue tears" and glow blue in the dark. The Japanese army actually collected these ostracods during WWII to use as lights for reading maps at night! Ostracods usually use this bioluminescence to distract predators, shooting out glowing mucus while they escape:

Some ostracod species use pulses of light to attract mates. In some, the male will release small balls of bioluminescent mucus, allowing the female to follow the light trail to find him. In one species hundreds of thousands of males synchronize their light display, and when one male creates a pattern of light, the new pattern will spread out as the neighboring males repeat it.

[drenched-in-sunlight]

I know you mostly focus on the Marika/Messmer relationship in your works (which can i just say i fucking ADORE IT IT'S SO GOOD GAAAH) but i wanted to ask, what do you think of the other parent? Who do you think Messmer's (and by extension Melina's) father is and what his relationship is with him? Is it Radagon? Godfrey? A secret third option perhaps??

im glad you enjoy my work!! as for your question, i think Messmer and Melina are like... parthenogenetic offsprings?? they are born of Marika only, which is why the game groups them in as brother and sister and they are the ones inheriting everything closest and most personal to Marika.

but i don't necessarily think they know each other exist, or at least it's my personal headcanon that Melina was born after Marika shattered the Elden Ring (at which point Messmer was already stuck in LoS, so he didn't know).

i actually think Marika only split into Radagon on the eve of Liurnia war, when Messmer had already been a grown young man fighting alongside Godfrey for a while. so technically, Messmer existed before Radagon. but on paper i guess the guy could be counted as Messmer and Melina's dad? cuz he's Marika still? (ugh my head)

but imo to Messmer and Melina they don't consider him their dad (and he doesn't consider them his. i lowkey think Messmer and Radagon despise each other 😭). they only regard themselves as Marika's children. at the same time, Messmer respects and trusts Godfrey, which is the closest he'll ever regard anyone else as a father figure.

[cyren-myadd]

Rant about Eywa theories

Eywa is one of the most interesting concepts in the Avatar universe, imo. The concept of an interplanetary consciousness that every native organism can "interface" with is so cool. One thing that really fascinates me about Eywa is how she goes about "protecting only the balance of life" as Neytiri explained to Jake. As of Avatar 1, Eywa did not react to the human threat mining and destroying the forest for several years, nor the genocide/abduction of the Sarentu clan, even though Eywa would've been aware of what was happening when the Na'vi shared their memories with her soul trees. She only reacted to the threat AFTER she was exposed to human memories of the destruction of earth when Jake interfaced with her via his avatar body, and then again when she interfaced with Grace’s human body. The reaction was similar to an immune response within a body attacking a foreign virus, with native fauna mobilizing to attack anything that registered as alien. One interesting thing of note about the immune response is that the animals were not physically connected to Eywa when they attacked, which means Eywa can somehow send commands to organisms “wirelessly.” This phenomena could also explain how the atokirina conveniently show up to stop Neytiri from killing Jake. Anyway, the immune response won the final battle of A1, in A2 we saw the immune response can't protect Pandora in its entirety. The recoms could get past the immune response undetected, and Bridgehead and the whaling ships didn't face an immune response at all.

Another interesting thing about Eywa we learned from the original script for Avatar 2, is that she is confirmed to have caused Grace’s pregnancy. Norm describes Kiri’s birth as “parthenogenesis,” which is a biological process in which an egg produces viable offspring without sperm from a male. (idk if the script needs a spoiler warning, so I'm putting one just to be safe) Based on the fact that Jake describes the pregnancy as “a mystery,” we can assume parthenogenetic birth isn’t something normal to the Na’vi’s alien reproductive cycle. On earth, parthenogenesis is only found in invertebrates and some plants. Assuming that Na’vi reproduction is somewhat similar to earth animal reproduction (which I think we can safely do since the Sully children clearly have inherited different traits from their parents, implying that they get half of their DNA from each parent just like on earth, but they are aliens so I could be completely wrong here), Grace would’ve had gametes inside of her avatar’s reproductive system, which are cells that only contain half of the genetic material to produce a viable offspring. A complex, multicellular organism like a Na’vi couldn’t exist without a full set of genes, so in order to produce a zygote (a new cell with a full set of genes that can grow into an embryo), the other half of the genetic material must’ve come from somewhere else, and the only place it could’ve come from is Eywa herself. This means that Eywa, to some capacity, can create or at least copy and reproduce genetic material. Since Kiri is so similar to Grace, it’s possible the other half of her genes are just a complete copy of Grace.

From all this we can conclude some things about Eywa.

We know she is not:

All powerful

All knowing

A “god” in the traditional sense

We know she is capable of:

Storing memories, including memories of the deceased from the last time they connected with her

Making decisions to react to threats based on those memories

Interfacing with an alien’s nervous system

Commanding fauna

Sending signals to organisms without physical contact

Creating/changing genetic material

What is still unclear is how Eywa’s consciousness works. Is she:

A sentient individual?

A hive mind of the deceased Na’vi?

An amalgamation of consciousness built from memories?

Something akin to a biological artificial intelligence?

Now that we’ve established the things that are confirmed about Eywa, I want to get into some speculation about what else she might be capable of. Note that from this point on I’m being purely SPECULATIVE and I’m not saying any of this is for sure possible in canon, I’m just coming up with hypotheses based on info we already have. After the end of Avatar 2, it looks like Jake and the Na’vi are planning to make their stand against the RDA, but if they want any hope of winning against the RDA’s superior technology, they’re going to need a combination of a Na’vi war force and divine intervention, just like in Avatar 1. The question is, how will Eywa help them? The one form of defense we’ve seen from her is the immune response, but that can only go so far. It can be fooled by avatars and recoms, and it is not strong enough to attack a heavily fortified base like Bridgehead. Eywa is going to have to step up her game, and I’ve created three theories on how she might do that.

📢potential spoiler warning for the last theory!📢

Theory 1: The 880 Virus

Project 880 is a screenplay James Cameron wrote in 1995 that eventually morphed into the Avatar we know and love today. One element in 880 that never made it to Avatar was the counter-viruses. For every earth virus the RDA brought with them to Pandora, Eywa created a counter-virus that would stop it, protecting both native organisms and the humans from getting sick from the viruses ever again. The RDA was even planning to create vaccines using the counter-viruses and sell them back on earth. At the end of Project 880 when the RDA is forced to retreat, Jake tells them that if they ever come back, Eywa will unleash a deadly virus that will wipe out any human that dares set foot on Pandora again. Even though Project 880 is not canon, I could see James Cameron revisiting his old idea to help the protagonists shake off the RDA forever. The problem is they’d need to find a way to protect the friendly humans like Spider and Norm.

Theory 2: Avatar Kiri

Between the parthenogenetic birth and Kiri’s ability to control vines (seen in The High Ground comic) and anemones (seen in Avatar 2), the movies are clearly setting up for there to be something special about her. In both the comic scene where she controlled plants and the movie scene where she controlled the anemones, the characters around her expressed confusion that she could do so, from which we can assume those are not normal abilities of a Na’vi. Since Kiri is also established to have a deep connection to Eywa, it is possible she is meant to act as an “avatar.” In the original context of the word, an avatar is a manifestation of a deity in mortal form, so Kiri would act as an avatar for Eywa. Since Kiri is a person and not a… whatever Eywa is, she can make her own decisions and react quickly to problems without having to absorb memories first. There’s no more information to speculate about what other abilities Kiri may develop in the future, so unfortunately, there’s not much else to discuss here that we can base on any evidence.

Theory 3: If you can’t beat em, join em

📢Here’s where we’re getting into potential spoiler territory.📢 In the BTS footage for Avatar 2, there were some scripts accidentally shown which described some very interesting scenes: Spider, breathing without a mask, and Kiri confessing to Mo’at that she caused it to happen. There was also some concept art shown in Las Vegas that depicted Spider with a neural queue plugged into the underwater spirit tree with Kiri. Full disclaimer, it’s entirely possible these are scrapped ideas and will not be seen in the Avatar franchise, but for the sake of this hypothesis, let’s assume they’re legit. I’ve seen a lot of people asking the question of HOW would this happen, but I haven’t seen anybody asking an equally important question: WHY? I’m very interested in the HOW and maybe I’ll make a discussion post on it later, but for my hypothesis let’s just talk about the WHY. Even though Kiri claimed responsibility for it, I don’t think this is something she could do without the help of Eywa, since Na’vi aren’t established to have the ability to radically alter other organisms. So why would Eywa want to give a human kid the ability to breathe the Pandoran air? Sure, he’s Kiri’s friend, but Eywa has never intervened to save an individual’s life just because people cared about them before (otherwise we’d still have Neteyam RIP). As Neytiri said, “The Great Mother protects the balance of life.” Eywa did not intervene to stop the destructive mining or protect the Sarentu, she only intervened AFTER Grace’s memories showed her that the RDA could potentially cause planet-wide destruction like on earth. So if she gave Spider this life-saving ability, there must be a bigger reason for it other than just Kiri wanting him to survive. My hypothesis is that Eywa has realized what a massive threat the humans pose to Pandora, and that her immune system response is insufficient to protect her biosphere. Her solution is to behave like a virus and weaponize the humans against themselves. When a virus infects a healthy organism, it “hacks” into healthy cells and reprograms them to attack uninfected cells and produce more viruses. Eywa will “hack” Spider’s biology the same way she “hacked” into Grace’s nervous system to interface with her, and will “reprogram” him to breathe the air and have a neural queue. Spider is already loyal to the Na’vi, so she doesn’t need to do anything further to him, but what if she repeated the process with other humans? Any human who gained a neural queue would be able to experience tsaheylu and the connection between all living things. Humans who are already loyal to Eywa would be able to fight back better with their new abilities, and it would give Eywa more access to more memories to gain a better understanding of the enemy. Humans who are loyal to the RDA would be more inclined to switch sides after experiencing Eywa’s consciousness, much like Jake did. I’m aware this final theory is a bit more out there than the others, but it spawned from me trying to answer the question of WHY would Spider get the ability to breathe the air and I felt like there had to be a bigger reason than just Kiri wanting to save him. Unlike Kiri, there’s not some special significance about Spider (other than his connection to Quaritch, but I don’t think Eywa would care about that) that would make him vital to the fight against the RDA, so I thought, what if he’s not special, he just happened to be the first piece of a much larger plan? And the result is this theory.

What do you think of my theories and do you guys have any of your own to share?

TLDR: Eywa is really cool, and in the future I think she could possibly defeat the RDA by unleashing a deadly virus, giving Kiri special powers, or "converting" Spider and other humans.

[sixamese-simblr]

The bulk of their population consists of haploid, sterile workers. In times of plenty, these are all clones of their queen. However, when under stress queens can choose to implant into an unrelated host animal that results in diploid hybrid children who have more varied characteristics. A diploid queen does not (normally) pass on DNA from the host parent to her offspring.

Busy designing increasingly fucked up reproductive strategies for my aliens instead of, you know, writing their story

[hey-hamlet]

The human body is a carnival of horrors

AKA I tell you about Teratomas and you hate me because of it <3

First of all, some etymology! A word ending with ‘oma’ is probably some sort of tumor and ‘terato’ is from the ancient Greek teras meaning monster, and in modern medicine pertaining to a birth defect (which. Yikes. Nice to know what old time-y doctors really think, huh?). Despite the name, they aren’t necessarily a from-birth thing, and they aren’t even cancer*! They don’t too rough, right? Well. That's because I haven’t told you about the teeth.

(*they can, in fact, be cancer. but very rarely, i promise!)

TW: Body horror, medical imagery under the read-more.

(Image owned by the Maude Abbott Medical Museum of McGill University)

So, if you don’t have a set of ovaries and for aren’t freshly born, you don’t need to worry as much about the teeth, because the type of teratomas I’m talking about are ‘mature cystic teratomas’ (also called grade 0 teratomas). These are the most common and the least likely to cause you physical harm, but highly likely to feature in your nightmares <3.

These ovarian teratomas occur when an egg decides it wants to be something cooler than an egg and doesn’t want to wait for sperm, or even to leave the ovarian follicle it was chilling in. This results in some spontaneous parthenogenetic development. Sadly, sperm is a pretty important ingredient in this whole shebang, at least in humans, so a teratoma is not a fetus, viable or not. Even more sadly, the teratoma does not care about this, and starts to develop anyway. 

Fun fact that wasn’t really relevant before this - you develop out of 3 different ‘germ cell layers’ as a fetus, the ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm. The mesoderm makes stuff like blood, muscles and bone while the endoderm makes stuff like the lining of your GI tract or your lungs. Ovarian teratomas are made up of ectoderm-derived tissue - like hair, skin, nerves, etc. 

But, you cry, the teeth???? Well my friend - teeth are not bones. Teeth are skin**. Ergo - teeth and hair in your ovaries.

(**this is a wild oversimplification, but you get my point, right?)

The worst part, at least for me, is the fact we don’t really know why they go rogue sometimes? Because of that, we don’t know how to avoid them! Very upsetting. Just another example of the fact we seem to know how literal stars work much better than we understand the human body. A true carnival of horrors, but, admittedly, one I’m pretty glad I have!

[lurking-latinist]

👀👀 wanna say more about your eusocial timelord theory?

when you sent this ask like a year ago apparently I did not, for which I apologize.

now it's the wee small hours and I'm trying to clear out my asks. but eusocial time lords are so fun. forgive anything that doesn't make sense/jars weirdly in this, I'm trying to explain some quite spitbally worldbuilding.

among other things, it's an explanation for (1) why are there so few time ladies on screen and (2) that very strange thing in I think it's in Gallifrey where Pandora was 'the first female President' and apparently that's a big deal? but like why would a different planet (where they regenerate!!) have the same manifestations of sexism as we have? and also vaguely riffing on the VNAs lore that Gallifrey used to be a matriarchy and Rassilon overthrew it, but also kind of completely transforming that lore.

so forget gender, this is not about gender. "male"/"female" is at best a very rough translation of the binary that Gallifreyans are concerned with, which is worker/queen. They are bees!

The Time Ladies (i.e. Gallifreyans played by female human actors) that we see in the pre-War era (all of this applies to the pre-War era)--Romana, the Rani, Flavia, Inquisitor Darkel--are biologically the equivalent of insect queens. (And the Doctor, the Master, Borusa, the Floating Time Lord, Commander Maxil, etc. etc. are the equivalent of worker bees. The fact that the former all present as female and the latter all present as male is just sort of a translation convention/useful coincidence, I guess.) Gallifreyans evolved from a eusocial species and their early political structures were developments of the hive structure, with reproductive capacity strongly linked to political authority.

Presumably this is what Rassilon, or whatever revolutionary Rassilon stole credit from, is supposed to have overturned--the link between reproductive capacity and political authority. But in my version, it was before that that Looming became a thing: the queens had control of the Looms, so it was the ultimate refinement of their arts and sciences, and it was their way of getting rid of whatever drone class there used to be, if they weren't already parthenogenetic.

And that's why there's the stereotype in Gallifrey--mentioned in connection with Pandora, suggested as a concern about Romana--that a "female" (queen) President will be autocratic. It's seen as a potential return to "how things once were."

And then I did a lot of worldbuilding for how government worked at a stage in history when there was a sort of uneasy balance between reproductive and political power, but that was for a fic Moki was working on and I think she's still working on it, so no spoilers!

So what you end up with is a hive structure where the role of the queen has been sort of abstracted away into... well, the hive itself. The power at the heart of Gallifrey is Gallifrey. I feel like that explains a lot of what's wrong with them.

There might be another branch of the species that evolved away from eusocial structure into something more like solitary bees and that's the Shobogans, possibly, since nobody seems at all clear what the Shobogans are.

Also I read that with naked mole rats, the only eusocial mammal, there are a few in each colony that are predisposed to not fit into the colony and instead go and wander and find other colonies, to promote genetic diversity, and I'm just saying, renegades.

And after the War when there are often maybe two Gallifreyans left, that's why whatever's left of the hivemind keeps trying to get at least one of them to turn out as a Time Lady. Fortunately for the universe, neither of them seems that interested in reproducing.