Natural History Wanderings

Slate reports

Two baby birds were born in California without any help from males—that is, they were each produced by a female bird alone. The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance released a report Thursday detailing the discovery, which reveals that condors, a critically endangered species of bird, are able to asexually reproduce.

A few years ago, the Wildlife Alliance researchers began tracing the parentage of the California condors they keep in captivity. (The goal was to better track the birds, after an incident in which a couple of birds accidentally had their wing tags switched.) But when researchers analyzed the genetic profile of two of the male baby chicks, they noticed something strange: The genetic markers used for parentage determination indicated they couldn’t have had a male parent. Each bird had just one parent.

Read more at Research: California condors can reproduce asexually.