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5th June 2019
11:52am BST

According to Live Science, staff at Boston's New England Aquarium had no idea that Anna was even pregnant before she started giving birth due to the absence of eggs when anacondas breed.
However, afterwards biologists concluded that the snake had given birth parthenogenesis, a word that translates as "virgin birth."
Parthenogenesis allows a female species to reproduce from the ovum without any kind of fertilisation. This asexual reproduction doesn't always lead to the birth the mother's exact clones, but in Anna's case, it did - and all of her babies' genes were in the same order as hers.
How cute.
What's not cute is that out of Anna's 18 baby anacondas, only two survived. 15 of the snakes were born stillborn and another passed a few days later.
This is not uncommon for babies born via parthenogenesis as there is a higher rate of genetic mutations and problems surrounding inbred populations.
Thankfully, there are no known cases of parthenogenesis in humans, though a scientist did successfully force virgin birth in a rabbit back in the 1930s.
Poor little gal.
Hope she's doing alright.