don't know how to get out of superscript italics, parthenogenesis, turkeys, science, long post, brain expansions

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laurelnose https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/666877650868027392/no-apologies-last-time-this-happened-to-me-it-was :

bomberqueen17 https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/666500110198439936/lol-as-one-of-the-people-who-sent-you-that-link-i :

laurelnose https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/666446448501669888/three-people-sent-me-articles-on-parthenogenesis :

three people sent me articles on parthenogenesis in California condors today. you talk about accidental parthenogen baby acquisition through oviposition kink one time and you’re The Parthenogenesis Guy forever!! (I love you all.)

anyways this is a neat new fact and a pretty interesting wrinkle to condor propagation. most likely a problematic one, given that avian parthenogenesis is on the whole somewhat less viable than reptile and fish parthenogenesis, but we’ll see! that said, I’m not really surprised that in such a small and extensively genetically monitored population we would end up finding evidence of parthenogenesis; most of the rarity of parthenogenesis seems to be because except in the extreme cases where females are kept in captivity without contact with males their entire lives, you can’t confirm it without a frankly ridiculous amount of genetic testing. i’m not overly familiar with the situation with avians, but for instance while it’s still (iirc) less than a dozen chondrichthyan species confirmed as parthenogenetic, I expect parthenogenesis is actually extremely widespread amongst chondrichthyans and we just can’t detect it. (it’s never been confirmed in chimaeriforms but I would be absolutely shocked if it turned out that none of an almost entirely deep-water clade were parthenogenetic. ...it would also have super weird phylogenetic implications if that were the case but that’s all hypothetical. anyways.) it’s likely similarly much more widespread than we know of in avians and even non-avian reptiles.

(honestly how many new species have to be confirmed as parthenogenetic before journalists stop breathlessly going “is parthenogenesis far more common than we used to think it was!?” every single time. the answer at this point is conclusively yes, LMFAO.)

however I’m really fascinated by a bit in the Atlantic’s coverage of the condor news—they offhandedly mention that parthenogenesis occurs at different rates in different species (I was aware of this) and it also apparently occurs at different rates between different domestic lines (I was not aware of this):

3 percent in commercial turkeys, to 16.9 percent in Beltsville small white turkeys.

16.9% in Beltsville small whites! almost six times the rate of parthenogenesis in a different line of the same fucking species! what! what!! what is parthenogenesis in turkeys linked to? how the fuck did we accidentally select for that?!

Keep reading https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/666446448501669888/three-people-sent-me-articles-on-parthenogenesis

LOL as one of the people who sent you that link I apologize, I should’ve expected others to do so, but I was just really excited because while I haven’t had any time to write in a solid week I’ve also been attempting to mentally outline the parthenogenesis bit of the fic, so it was oddly synchronous…

what we need is parthenogenesis in hogs, because keeping a boar is so damned expensive. RIP Arthur, I will be back in spring to try and dig up your skull…

We’ve never tried to raise turkeys from eggs but if only we could get funding I’d love to try it… I do have a perfectly good incubator sitting right here not getting used…. and we’re stuck raising Broad Breasted Whites which can’t reproduce naturally and are too large for most of our customers…. but you can’t get Beltsville Small Whites anywhere for love or money, so.

god i wish i was good at science

no apologies! last time this happened to me it was because a paper on the mildly obscure clade I was studying came out while I was in the middle of finishing my thesis and I think I got linked to that article by like seven different people, it was hilarious. this time it’s because I have a deeply weird fandom blog! the entrancing experience of being known is that sometimes you get to keep score of how many people look at the same weird thing and go “Socks must hear of this.”

parthenogenesis in hogs

huh. leaving aside that creating mammals that can naturally create parthenogenetic offspring would be a level of genetic fuckery that boggles the mind to contemplate, how much less cost-effective is it to just buy boar semen? or is that infeasible in some other way?

i don’t know how i’d design the experiment #but it would be awesome to

attempt to get BSW turkeys to parthenogate #whatever that word is

parthenogenesis is a word that is rarely verbed but you very occasionally see both “parthenogenerate” and “parthenogeneticize.” as far as I’m concerned, parthenogeneticize is riffing off the wrong root word and it should be parthenogenerate. or “reproduce asexually” though, funnily enough, this is a somewhat controversial description of the process where a female produces offspring without having sex (usually) (okay sometimes you do still need to have the sex to reproduce without sex) (god nature is so fucking weird).

anyways the first thing professors tell you when you say “idk how I would do that though” is always “Have you checked the literature?” because reinventing the experimental design wheel is for suckers. the Beltsville Small White Turkeys (BSWs) study that selected for increased parthenogenesis is M.W. Olsen’s 1965 paper “Twelve Year Summary of Selection for Parthenogenesis in Beltsville Small White Turkeys https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/00071666508415546” and I am pleased to report Dr. Olsen’s paper is fairly thorough and quite readable. A+. we will steal his methodology.

Keep reading https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/666877650868027392/no-apologies-last-time-this-happened-to-me-it-was

oh gosh this is fascinating and also entirely outside of my area of expertise. (I last had a natural sciences class in my junior year of high school.)

Parthenogenerate is my new favorite word. Mammals have an embryo kill-switch what the fuck. well. I mean. yeah. Mammalian reproduction is wacky.

I don’t want to too-closely examine the list of things I get sent by a startling array of people, many of whom I had not thought were paying attention like that. This comes of having had the same URL for ten years, though.

Boar semen is more expensive than you’d think, and then you have to uh. Interface. with the sow. Yourself. And that’s not. Uh. Well it’s a lot easier to do if you are 6-700 lbs, and have tusks. And an improbably-long weirdly independently-animate corkscrew penis, and a penchant for fucking anything you can get to hold still long enough for you to mount. oh would that tumblr’s site search worked so i could find the entry i wrote about how PB the boar fucked a tree.

But, on topic, it’s safe to say, no, you really don’t want to actually breed for parthenogenesis in turkeys. A side note: turkeys lay a lot fewer eggs than chickens. You can sell turkey eggs for kind of a lot of money, for this reason. So that was an expensive-as-hell experiment this guy was running. In his defense they were not at that time endangered heritage birds though, not like they are now. And no if the offspring can only be male that’s a lot less interesting.

I can speak with some authority, despite my lack of scientific education, that no you cannot eat an egg you have been incubating: if an embryo is not growing in it then bacteria is. Also as a long-time chicken keeper who has had a fair share of Egg Surprises, no. (Your picture was not posted)