Female anaconda gives ‘virgin birth’ to 18 baby snakes because she don’t need no man

The future is female.

And it's got loads of snakes too. As the years progress, there comes fewer and fewer reasons for the male species to exist on this earth. Women can work outside of the home now. We can vote. We can open jars, catch spiders, and dominate in just about every single field. There is no need for men anymore, except to pro-create of course, and even then some gals have figured out a way to conceive without the aid of a man at all. One of those gals is Anna and she's a 10 foot long snake from Boston who recently gave birth to 18 babies all on her own. No male present. She don't need him. She's an independent woman. 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.