No sex please, we're fishies!

Original story at BBC News

Apparently, the Amazon Molly is a female-only fish species that reproduces by mating with males of other species in order to trigger reproduction, but by a bizarre quirk all offspring are not only female but clones of their mothers.

This gives me an irresistible urge to quote Dave Barry. Sorry, someone was going to do it, so I thought I might as well get in with it first:

Most fish live underwater, which is a terrible place to have sex because virtually anywhere you lie down there will be stinging crabs and large quantities of little fish staring at you with buggy little eyes. So generally when two fish want to have sex, they swim around and around for hours, looking for some place to go, until finally the female gets really tired and has a terrible headache, and she just dumps her eggs right on the sand and swims away. Then the male, driven by some timeless, noble instinct for survival, eats the eggs. So the truth is that fish don't reproduce at all, but there are so many of them that it doesn't make any difference.

       -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know"