"I didn't know!"

In my days at 911 (see forthcoming book, "What's Your Emergency?") it was not surprising to get calls from women who were in the condition we labeled "Maternity: Birth Imminent." These things happen when they are going to happen, we all know that. 

But every so often, we got a call from someone who had apparently missed a lot of Sex Education classes, because she would tell the operator up and down that, although a human head and an arm or two were currently coming out of her, she had no idea she was pregnant.  

I'm no OB/GYN, but I do number one such person among my friends, so don't make me ask him how this happens. Let us assume that the conception occurred in the traditional manner, in a Chevy van. 

Our friends the condors don't have that story to fall back on, but two California condors are befuddling scientists by having "virgin births." They laid fatherless eggs!

In the 1980s, the California condor total population was down to 22 birds! And science has been helping nature repopulate ever since Simon and Garfunkel sang "El Cóndor Pasa."

GENESIS was a rock band so devoid of joy or excitement that people often fell into deep sleep as they droned on about lambs lying down on Broadway. But PARTHOGENESIS is something else again! It's what nature calls "virgin birth" - asexual reproduction in which an egg becomes an embryo without sperm. 

It's not just condors! Lizards, Swellsharks, and Chinese water dragons - a wee reptile that looks like Dino Flintstone - all do it. 

Sarah Zhang reports in The Atlantic that scientists at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance found two male condor chicks with no genetic contribution from any males in the program.

"This is truly an amazing discovery. We were not exactly looking for evidence of parthenogenesis, it just hit us in the face," co-author Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, says in a press release. "We only confirmed it because of the normal genetic studies we do to prove parentage."

Sad to say, both of these chicks died young - one from malnourishment at age two, and one at age eight, from a foot infection.

"They certainly weren’t, shall we say, shining specimens of the condor," Demian Chapman, a biologist at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, told the Atlantic, somewhat ungallantly.

But California condors often live to be 60. Scientists figure that genetic mutations resulting from parthenogenesis might have led to these two being vulnerable, lacking, as they were, the genetic diversity that is added from the DNA of another parent, says the  National Geographic. 

"We only now have the genetic tools to look at this in detail," Ryder says. "Previously, parthenogenesis was really identified by seeing females who weren’t housed with males have offspring. But now we know the condor can have offspring while being housed with males and it begs the question, 'Is this going on more than we know?'"

I'll answer that. Yes, it is. 

And it just goes to prove the old theory that it does indeed take two to tango.