Re: Parthogenesis in birds.

On 2009-07-13, troll <trolidous@xxxxxx> wrote:

I have grown more and more skeptical that anything
useful can ever be derived from browsing through
usenet.

Overall, it is simply an endless stream of persons
disconnected from reality posting false information,
countered with an endless stream of useless and
uninformative insults, followed by an endless number
of false information posted ad nauseum.

and pun cascades.


The search engines are also useless. They
will always generate an infinite number of hits
to newsy factoids,

For small values of infinity.

that usually don't actually
say anything, and don't bother to care whether
the information that they are presenting is true
either. They will also show a large number of
hits to advertisements.

Maybe if I only use search engines that only
link to .edu domains.

scholar.google.com is good for that, esp. if you
have access to a university library that has
electronic subscriptions to journals.


The question is, how common is parthogenesis
in birds?

scholar sez:

BL Astaurov, YS Demin. "Parthenogenesis in birds".
The Soviet journal of developmental biology.
1972 Mar-Apr;3(2):95-111. Looks like the electronic
version only goes back to 1992.

Olsen, Marlow W. "Parthenogenesis in animals."
This is a publication of the US Agricultural
Research Service. You're only going to find this
in a research library, so here's the call number:
A 77.15:NE-56-NE-67

I'm seeing studies that reference turkeys, chickens,
pigeons, and the Zebra finch. Based on this, I'd
say that its presence in large populations of
domesticated birds that are relatively easy to
study would allow you to conclude that it exists
in population of birds that are not nearly so easy
to study. As to rates, I'll leave that to the citations
above.



Reasonably, if a bird lays an egg, it
has dedicated a high level of resources to egg
production, relatively more than that of a mammal,
since all of the food for the growing chick is in the
egg.

If a cell inside the egg is not fertilized properly,
those resources go to waste if nothing develops
in the egg. This would seem to help select for
a meiosis bypass or alternate recombination to
prevent the wastage of resources. I would imagine
that the bird simply eats the egg if it does not grow
a chick.

Parthogenesis does happen in some reptiles. What
about different bird species? Is it very common in
some of them or is it generally rare?

I know that it is rather unlikely that I could get any
useful or informative information from this post.

I thought I might try, however.


.

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