Burying the lede, making mistakes

Fancy directs me to a story on Reuters about a Christmas miracle-- reptile style!

Flora, a pregnant Komodo dragon living in a zoo, is expecting eight babies in what scientists said on Wednesday could be a Christmas virgin birth.

Flora has never mated, or even mixed, with a male dragon, and fertilised all the eggs herself, a process culminating in parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. Other lizards do this, but scientists only recently found that Komodo dragons do too.

So far it's just a joke about Jesus, but check out THIS:

The scientists, reporting the discovery in the science journal Nature, said it could help them understand how reptiles colonise new areas. A female dragon could, for instance, swim to another island and establish a new colony on her own.

"The genetics of self-fertilisation in lizards means that all her hatchlings would have to be male. These would grow up to mate with their own mother and therefore, within one generation, there would potentially be a population able to reproduce normally on the new island," Buley added.

Unwrap the gift, and you've got yourself a classic implication. On a related note, what happens when you search around for "Kimono dragon"? Mostly a lot of typos. But also this fun!



Also, my mom and I are adopting a chameleon for a few days this week while its owners go on a trip. We have to feed him grasshoppers and periodically spray him with water. Right now the plan is to put him in the basement, which is also where the one fully functional bathroom in my house is located. This means that every time someone goes downstairs to take a shower, they also have to give the lizard a shower!