St. Louis: A 62-year-old female dragon has laid seven eggs at the main zoo in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, while she has been alone for the last 20 years, meaning she has not mated with a male dragon.
This female dragon belongs to a type of dragon called the “ball python” with an average age of 30 to 40 years. In that sense, it is the oldest female dragon in the zoo.
Experts say that although the incubation of male pythons in the females without males has been rarely observed, they cannot be ruled out as completely impossible.
This is also possible because the female python naturally has the ability to store the sperm of its male dragon for a long time, which it later uses to lay eggs. That is, we cannot call this process “laying eggs without a male”.
However, the case of the female dragon kept in the St. Louis Zoo is astonishing because in the first place, the pythons do not exceed 40 years of age, while their females stop laying eggs at the age of 30. Are
Although the news has been circulating in the media for a few days now, the officials of St. Louis Zoo say that the female ball python laid these seven eggs on July 23 this year.
Two of the eggs were damaged, two were sent to a laboratory for genetic analysis, and the other three have been retained.
It is hoped that some of these hatched eggs will hatch by the end of this month, as the pythons have a hatching period of 53 to 55 days.
Genetic analysis will reveal whether the eggs were laid without mating with a male dragon or fertilized with sperm stored years ago.
But even if this entanglement is resolved, the laying of a female dragon’s egg at the age of 62 will still be an amazing event.