Post #14751

Half female, half male. The strangest mutation of birds and more No, this is not a flashy headline to attract attention. Yes, in the preview photo there is a real bisexual bird, one half of whose body has developed along the male path, and the other along the female path. And the strangest thing is that it is not unique. Bisexual individuals have been found among 40 species of birds, and they are so common that scientists have a special term for this phenomenon - gynandromorphism. For such a strange creature to be born at all, everything must go wrong even before fertilization. First, an egg should appear with two nuclei instead of one. Then it must be successfully fertilized by a sperm, after which the egg has an insignificant chance of developing into an adult animal, as if sewn from two halves. Only one in thousands of gynandromorphs is eventually born. However, despite the obvious external oddities, gynandromorph birds feel surprisingly normal. They get food, communicate with neighbors, chirp provocatively and look for a mate. And although such birds do not have offspring, they live an absolutely normal life as a male or female - it all depends on which half’s hormones take over. A normal pair of female (left) and male (right) for comparison. But bisexual half-birds are flowers. And the berries are bisexual half-and-half insects, spiders, crustaceans and lizards that look just as abnormal. And they all live, hunt, interact with neighbors, and some of them even reproduce successfully, giving normal healthy offspring. To date, scientists have discovered gynandromorphs among 150 animal species, and the list continues to grow every year. But there are practically no mammals in it. After all, in some sense, mammals are special. Our bodies are designed in such a way that the sex of an animal depends not so much on genes, but on the hormones that the fetus produces in the first weeks of development. Therefore, a “hormonal battle” occurs inside the mammal between the two halves of the animal’s body. And if it does not lead to its death, then one side inevitably wins, and the animal turns into a normal male or female. You can find out that something is wrong with your body purely by chance by analyzing its DNA. Could there be gynandromorphists among people? Purely theoretically, yes, but in practice, none of these could be found. However, the very nature of gynandromorphism still poses uncomfortable questions to scientists. For a long time it was believed that the behavior of such animals is completely determined by the dominant hormonal background - that is, the bird behaves either like a male or like a female, period. But recent observations have shown that some bisexual finches exhibit a completely unique behavioral repertoire, not characteristic of either sex separately. This means that the brains of such animals can work according to their own logic - and we are still barely beginning to understand it. Author: Yaroslav Ilyin