So they get together with males of other species to trigger reproduction? Sounds just like the Asari in Mass Effect to me. Though they apparently do use the partner's DNA (I wonder if that's what the Amazon Molly is somehow doing)?

Sigh... I'll never forget my brief liaison with Liara... possibly the funniest moment in any computer game ever, and as sexually charged as a late night Channel 5 movie, yet it somehow still managed to irk the censors!

Actually they do use males... of other species, just to get excited and expell the eggs.

Anyhow there's been some recent research also on some other asexual complex animals (rotifers) and it seems they have other tricks to keep their genome healthy and variegated (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080402145746.htm): they repair their broken DNA, causing random changes. This seems to be an adaptation to dehidratation but it also protects them from radiation.

The Amazon Molly parthenogen species complex is know for many years as just that; the females need to be stimulated in some sense by the presence of male sperm but then go on with the standard split-my-own-cells-and-stick-them-back-together way of sexless reproduction. So that's not news.

Many models try to explain why this is bad, and really so bad that it's even worse than sex(*). It goes all the way back to famous brit RA Fisher, pointing out that if a mother makes 2 daughters per generation (as will those) then your population doubles every generation; if a mother has to make 1 son and 1 daughter per generation (to mate with another mother's offspring) at the same cost, then the population stays at the same level. (If both make 4 children, it's "doubles" versus "quadruples", etc.) This is the famous "2-fold cost of sex". So any heritable trait that lets you avoid this cost will be very advantageous.

So what they in the BBC article claim to have done, is make a model along these lines, run the numbers and find out the outcome didn't fit. Thus only pointing out some assumption somewhere is wrong? I don't get it, are peer review standards slipping?

The most typical arguments contra parthenogenesis are M"uller's Ratchet and similar, that the recombination in sex allows you to combine good, or less-damaged, genes with other good ones and maintain your population's health; without recombination you will eventually have bad mutations in each gene and no way to improve this. [One way to repair this is recombination-with-yourself, so that the daughter is not an identical copy of you, but in each locus has either both alleles that the mother had or two copies of one of the two --- drawback is that you lose a lot of variation until everybody has 2 copies of the same allele in each locus anyway; but after that it's a good way to repair your genome.]

But these not-working models or not-fitting numbers are old news; a working one would be good news. Hm.

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*No it didn't surprise anyone that it was an (very very late-victorian) englishman that tried to convince the world what a pointless and costly distraction sex is.

When I saw the tagline, I thought you were implying that asexual lasses might not find riding a bicycle that much fun.

Paris, because she does like riding a bicycle.

I'm doing bit for the species.

When I read the tagline, I was thinking more on the lines of "village bicycle"...

"Quite how it has survived remains a mystery, although one theory suggests occasional liaisons with males in which DNA is taken on board to "refresh" the species' genetic make-up."

There must be so few of these males... so perhaps "village bicycle" is the correct term after all.

Just watch out for natural selection via STD.

If the females self-replicate, I assume they all have identical DNA, and come from a single ancestor (from a Darwinian perspective). If that's so, where do the males come from?

The extraterrestrial explination would, of course, be Intelligent Design, since Darwin was, in fact, terrestrial. Or a terrist?

Interesting but but why do I have the feeling that Nature has a hidden sneaky surprise waiting for these wankers who have appeared to overlooked the obvious ?

I thought ALL marriages were like that.

Ah well, at least the article does confirm what we've always known, that even in the absence of male partners, females smell of phish.

without any males, what do they spend their time complaining about?

everything, they just have to find someone else to blame.

...yet your DESIRE shall be for your husbad, and he shall rule over you."