You said what?
Look at this quote:
females had none of the bite marks that are usually inflicted on their gender during shark sex.
I know what you’re thinking – “has Alex been reading shark porn again?” No, I haven’t. Anyway, why do you automatically wonder if I’ve been reading shark porn again? I’ve never read shark porn! Why does your mind go straight for the porn? I’d worry about yourself reader before going off the deep end with your musings about me and shark porn.
Anyway, that quote comes from a BBC News story about a bonnethead shark (related to the hammerhead shark, but it’s head doesn’t look like a bonnet to me…) that managed to asexually reproduce in captivity. I say managed, I don’t know if it was trying to do it, or it just happened.
As a man, this development worries me – if something as complex as a shark can reproduce without the male of it’s species, how far away are we from the human being being able to do it? A previous study I read about showed that the male of the species in mammals is rubbish at copying the Y chromosome so it becomes damaged each time. Eventually it will become so damaged that males are sterile. There was a silver lining though – a mammal in Russia has been found that jumped that shark (whether or not it was an asexually reproduced shark we don’t know) and now has males with no Y chromosome. Somehow the genetic code got moved to some other chromosome, probably as part of males being rubbish at copying it.
I’ll admit this is a strange post, but I wasn’t the one that brought up shark porn. That was you.