Abstract
A surprise in the anaconda exhibit Confusion turned to excitement at the New England Aquarium earlier this year when Anna, a female green anaconda housed only with other female anacondas, gave birth to 18 young. “We were all pretty surprised. It’s not every day that you walk into an exhibit of four female anaconda to find a whole bunch of baby anacondas,” Tori Babson, a biologist at the New England Aquarium, tells Newscripts. DNA testing confirmed the mechanism behind the bewildering birth: parthenogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction that’s common in invertebrates and plants but less frequently seen among snakes. Anna the anaconda needed a male about as much as she needed a bicycle. One of Anna’s egg cells joined to a second polar body, a typically unused by-product of egg creation. Unbeknownst to her keepers, she was pregnant with all female offspring. Warren Booth, a biologist at the University
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