14 DAY TRIAL // Recently, a baby slithering creature was born to a yellow-bellied water snake living in captivity at the Cape Girardeau Conservation Center in Missouri, US.
The odd thing about this birth is that the female snake got pregnant and then delivered without any help whatsoever from a male. That's right, we're talking about a virgin birth.
It wasn't the snake's first immaculate conception
Caretakers at the Cape Girardeau Conservation Center say it was just last year that the very same female, now 8 years old, gave birth to two other baby snakes despite never having been anywhere near a male.
The young reptiles seem to be perfectly healthy. Like their mother, they live at the Cape Girardeau Conservation Center, where they are well looked after.
Unfortunately, the offspring born to the yellow-bellied water snake this year didn't survive. For now, it's unclear why it was that it died shortly after birth.
Interestingly, word has it this female is the first snake of its kind so far documented to become pregnant and deliver a new generation without first mating.
“This yellow-bellied water snake is the first that we know of. There's no other record of a yellow-bellied doing this,” wildlife expert Michelle Randecker commented on the odd occurrence, as cited by People Pets.
Virgin births are not unheard of in the natural world
Although an oddity through and through, virgin births are not entirely unheard of in the natural world. On the contrary, quite a few instances of animals conceiving without a partner have been documented over the years.
The official term for such occurrences is parthenogenesis, i.e. having an offspring develop from an unfertilized egg and so not carrying any genetic information from a male.
The majority of the species known to be capable of parthenogenesis are reptiles, sharks or birds. Only last year, a study recorded several instances of virgin births among fish populating an estuary in Florida.