“Sexual reproduction is sort of an evolutionary mystery.”
Dr. Katy Greenwald has a longstanding interest in puzzling out the success and persistence of North America’s “gene thieves,” the unisexual (all female) Ambystoma salamanders. These salamanders have what is without a doubt the world’s weirdest known form of reproduction. Opportunistic unisexual female salamanders swipe the sperm of males from other species, resulting in offspring with many different genome combinations. Something thought to be well-understood—sexual reproduction—turns out to be much wilder than we knew.
How to Find Out More About Katy’s Work
Watch “The Unisexuals: A Story of Salamanders and Sex”. This video was made by Science Friday, a show on National Public Radio. A short piece on Science Friday about Katy’s work spurred us to contact Katy for an interview where we could find out more. Katy does a great job describing the clever ways of the unisexual mole salamander on The Shape of the World, but we totally love this video for helping fill in the visual detail.
Visit Katy on Twitter, @amphibs.
Visit the website for Katy’s lab. The unisexual salamanders are almost a side project. The majority of the work done by Katy and her students is around using DNA analysis to assess how animals persist in areas dominated by human land use. They use molecular tools to answer ecological or conservation-related questions.
The original discovery of unisexual mole salamanders was described in 1992 by Jim Bogart, a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario.
