After 30 Years of Breeding Condors, a Secret Comes Out
‘Virgin birth’ might be more common in animals than we thought.
When you get to be as endangered as the California condor, your sex life becomes a highly public affair. Since 1983, when the number of California condors in existence was a mere 22, biologists have been carefully breeding the birds in captivity. They kept track of who mated with whom, how many offspring they had, and when those offspring were released into the wild. All of this is logged in the official California-condor “studbook.”
So it was quite a shock when, a few years ago, scientists conducting DNA tests as part of routine research found . These two birds—known by their studbook numbers as SB260 and SB517—were not related to the fathers recorded in the studbook. Actually, they
