Dragaera

How will House Phoenix arise from the ashes?

Davdi Silverrock davdisil at gmail.com
Mon Dec 12 23:45:07 PST 2005

On 12/12/05, Kenneth Gorelick <pulmon at mac.com> wrote:
>
> Freemartins are the result of parthenogenesis
>

They most certainly are not.

[Begin Cite]

When a heifer twin shares the uterus with a bull fetus, they also
share the placental membranes connecting the fetuses with the dam.

A joining of the placental membranes occurs at about the fortieth day
of pregnancy, and thereafter, the fluids of the two fetuses are mixed.
 This causes exchange of blood and antigens carrying characteristics
that are unique to each heifers and bulls.  When these antigens mix,
they affect each other in a way that causes each to develop with some
characteristics of the other sex.

Although the male twin in this case is only affected by reduced
fertility, in over ninety percent of the cases, the female twin is
completely infertile.  Because of a transfer of hormones or a transfer
of cells, the heifer's reproductive tract is severely underdeveloped
and sometimes even contains some elements of a bull's reproductive
tract. A freemartin is genetically female, but has many
characteristics of a male.  The ovaries of the freemartin do not
develop correctly, and they remain very small.

[...skip a bit...]

In some cases, there are no symptoms of freemartinism because the male
twin may have been aborted at an earlier stage of gestation.

[End Cite]


Research!  How hard is it, given Google?

Thus endeth today's lesson in developmental biology in cattle.

>
>--one egg, no sperm, no waiting, no wooing.
>

Nonsense.

Now, if you had said originally:

"Perhaps Phoenix can reproduce parthenogenetically, especially with
post-Interregnum reproductive sorcery",

I wouldn't have anything to carp about.  But if you're going to make
statements which are easily refuted with two seconds of research,
then, well, you'll have to expect to be easily refuted.