Lizard Previously Unknown To Science Found On Vietnam Menu 133
eldavojohn writes "A lizard long served on the menu in the Mekong Delta has recently caught the attention of scientists when it was noted that all animals in the species appeared identical as well as female. The species appears to be a hybrid of two other species (like a mule or liger). But the curious thing is that this hybrid isn't sterile — it reproduces asexually. The species, known for some time in Vietnam, has now officially been named Leiolepis ngovantrii."
Re:I'll take one (Score:4, Funny)
Lizard: The other white meat.
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Get ready for McLizard.
Leiolepis ngovantrii? (Score:3, Funny)
Leiolepis ngovantrii, That's a mouthful. And a delicious mouthful too.
Re:Leiolepis ngovantrii? (Score:5, Funny)
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Pat for short.
TERRIBLE RESTAURANT!!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
You got a Lizard on the Menu? I had a fly in the soup!
No tip from me, that's for sure. And I'm telling all my friends about this!
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Next time, don't order the fly soup. Try the grub sandwich, instead.
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I ordered a pulled pork sandwich, and got the same thing as my girlfriend - who'd ordered a hotdog.
This gave me some serious second-thoughts.
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Info [wikipedia.org]
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I had a fly in the soup!
Well, at these prices, I would expect at least two..
Hmmm.. what if (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm.. what if (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmm.. what if (Score:5, Funny)
Get pretty crowded in the basement wouldn't it?
Re:Hmmm.. what if (Score:5, Funny)
Would make LAN parties slightly easier to organise at least.
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But everyone would have the same skill level, being clones and all. No cannon fodder.
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Just sayin'
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A good nature vs nurture experiment! One of the clones is bound to randomly think up some better tactics every so often, and in my case any clones who did well would start to improve in confidence and rise to the top of the ranks, while the others would feel demoralised for a while and have a tougher time of it. It must be pretty embarrassing getting repeatedly beat by yourself.
Re:Hmmm.. what if (Score:5, Funny)
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The only thing I know is I would be one rich dude.
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Then /. would be the place on the Internet with the most (knuckle)children as opposed to the least.
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Eh. If you're going to take the "you can't prove it DOESN'T happen" approach, then we may as well assume that some humans can outrun speeding bullets, stop locomotives dead in their tracks, and leap tall buildings in a single bound. After all, given the lack of 'medical science' that we presently have compared to what we'll have in a hundred years, you'd be a fool to completely write it off, right?
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You wouldn't' be a fool to write it off after you studies the part of the bible and that part of the world at that time. Assuming there were a 'Joseph' and 'Mary' it would be far more likely they made up the story so she wouldn't be killed.
Of course, taking a pregnant woman through that part of the world during that time would really mean the husband would be a childless widower when he arrived. SO the whole thing is ridiculous. And before some one parrots what there religious leader says at me, the census
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I wonder how the world would function if we reproduced asexually (ie 1 gender only). lol
It would be one honking huge banana republic, obviously.
Biggest question not answered! (Score:5, Funny)
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Quoting the CNN article
Grismer complained that he had to hold his breath while eating the local dish to appear polite to the restaurant owners.
"You take a bite out of it and it feels like something very old and dead in your mouth," he said.
Re:Biggest question not answered! (Score:5, Funny)
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In an ironic twist that any American who has visited Vietnam can attest to, the KFC in the socialist republic is literally finger-licking good. It is amazing how good the southeast asian (non-vietnamese) imported chicken is. I think it's from Thailand or something. You can mock the Colonel, but imagine his 11 herbs and spices on really, really good chicken meat.
Of course, what gets the locals in the door at KFC here is that the Colonel kinda looks like Uncle Ho - same beard,and his hair isn't so obvious in
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I suppose that's better that tasting like something very young and ALIVE...
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my mind wanders..
Re:Biggest question not answered! (Score:5, Informative)
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It is crispy and sweet, like snakes.
Thanks, that will help. :-)
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My wife is a native VNese speaker and her native language artifacts in English are nothing like mekongdelta's, so yeah, I think it's rather suspect.
Re:Biggest question not answered! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, I love that spelling, too; fortunately, the actual pronunciation sounds something like "dowm" (rhymes with "down"). Bich (a name) doesn't sound like what you might expect, either :-)
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So the moral of your story is:
"Grabbing the lizard is good for your Dong."
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OK, if you know Can Tho I'm more inclined to believe you :-)
Don't know the water in the delta, but if you drank water out of the Saigon River these days, *that* would be probably kill you :-)
I haven't been to VN in 5 years, but I'm sure the Saigon River is as nasty as ever :-(
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Magnificent.
Yummy! (Score:1)
Yes, but (Score:1, Redundant)
On this menu (Score:1)
Iguana on a Stick Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Alternative allusion:
"You eat one Iguana on a Stick.
+25 hit points.
Temporary +1 to Science skill"
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You forgot the Rads.
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Be glad we got to see it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Be glad we got to see it before we eat it into extinction (too.)
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what have we ever eaten into extinction?
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"A monkey species was eaten into extinction last year - the gorilla could be next"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/24/highereducation.biologicalscience [guardian.co.uk]
The monkey species is the "Miss Waldron's Red Colobus". Wikipedia corroborates that it may have been eaten to extinction recently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Waldron's_Red_Colobus [wikipedia.org]
Unknown to Science... (Score:4, Insightful)
Usually means unknown to western science.
I'm sure some ancient biologist documented them but it was never translated to English, if written at all. Its hard enough for the casual observer to tell a lizard's gender that nobody even noticed.
Rural people, even western people, see things every day in their environment that they assume is well known, and never bother to document. When noticed "scientists" it somehow becomes a discovery.
Someone "Discovered" America. Those already living in America at the time "Discovered" large sailboats at about the same time. Perspective.
Re:Unknown to Science... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason for that. If you or I or a local group of people know something, great. But it's local, and limited, and easy to wipe out. Once that knowledge escapes that small group, either by the actions of that group or by an external factor it becomes something greater: part of the shared knowledge of humanity from which someone with no connection to the initial source of information can nonetheless make use of. For instance I'm working on a paper with a Chinese collaborator about the traditional use of certain plants by local farmers to combat pest insects. We're describing what those local farmers are doing (and probably have been doing for centuries) and providing an additional biochemical perspective; this knowledge will for the first time be available globally. It could lead to new insecticides, or perhaps the wider adoption of these plants themselves as organic insecticidal agents, and either or both could be done far outside the isolated community in which the use of these plants was found. This work is just a tiny part of a much larger, decades-long, global research effort by thousands of scientists (note lack of scare quotes) to try and take traditional medicine and other practices (including westerners: aspirin [wikipedia.org], for example), discover what works, how it works, and make that knowledge generally available. How's that for some perspective?
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and then patent it (e.g. turmeric), so they can use it commercially. The patent then raises the specter of legal threats against the people who use it and have been using it traditiona
Not our fault (Score:1)
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Usually means unknown to western science.
Um, no, it means "unknown to science". The sous-chef at Crazy Duong's Iguana Eatery is not a scientist, nor is his second cousin with the acupuncture needles and the powdered tiger penis.
Someone "Discovered" America. Those already living in America at the time "Discovered" large sailboats at about the same time. Perspective.
Someone "Discovered" an ant colony. Those already living in the ant colony "Discovered" some huge monster peering at them with a magnifying glass. Perspective.
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the idea of western science is a false dichotomy. There is no western science, there is no eastern science, there is just science.
When ti is documented and study it's considered a scientific discovery.
Yes, the discovered America. They didn't know much about it. They went there documented for them it was a discovery.
Just like when I first moved to this city, and discovered a nearby 7/11.
If you went out,, found something not previously discovered and correctly documented that YOU would have made a scientific
sexual reproduction (Score:5, Insightful)
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If cloning is the only way they reproduce, they either must be genetically perfect for their environment or their environment has resisted drastic change.
cloning means you do not need to be perfect at all (Score:2, Insightful)
Cloning does not mean you must be perfect. The clone is genetically just as good as the parent, so you only must be able to live.
The big advantage of sexual reproduction is that you get much more combinations, i.e. you can combine your faults much better and carry around a much bigger amount of faults.
So clones are usually better, but only as long as the rules do not change. Once a fault gets a bonus because it gives you some immunity to some illness, the clones have a hard time, because they do not collect
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But you do have a point. Sexual reproduction is typically faster to adapt then asexual reproduction.
I was going to say something along the lines of how a strain of bacteria is probably able to change a larger pe
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There are 24 billion chickens and 1.53 billion cows in the world. BEING TASTY TO HUMANS IS A SURVIVAL TRAIT!
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On the other hand, there are probably less than a million Bison left in the world, and they taste MUCH better than cows or chicken. Being tasty might be a survival trait today in some parts of the world, for some species, but it's also been rather detrimental at times.
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Highly detrimental. I should say "Tasty and manageable" in the future.
"We breed chicken/pig/cow to be a tasty treat. We're bred to eat that tasty meat."
With allergies and such we might find that we've restricted ourselves to very limited food choices. Even now I know people who have limitations on what food they can eat to such an extreme that I'm amazed they can live.
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I don't think that is as much of a disadvantage as most people think.
I provide, as an example, feral dogs and feral pigs.
Dogs that go feral start from one of the many breeds that we have of dogs, yet once they interbreed in "the wild," they breed back true to form. All pigs that go feral, in a very short few generations, regain hair and dark pigmentation.
If humans ceased to exist tomorrow, the cattle, chickens and pigs that survive "the fall of man" will breed true to form and diversify quite easily. Huma
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And that is the point of evolution. Out of those billions of cows there will be some that won't "get a fresh udder infection every other week" and they'll win the evolutionary lottery.
Don't kid yourself: the 1.53 billion cows quoted above is a very large number of cows; not only will some survive, but lots will survive in lots of areas -- enough to interact and to continue to survive generation to generation. (Though I try not to imagine the stench of 1.5299 billion dead cows!)
But that's not even taking i
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It's a niche adaptation... and like all niche adaptations, it's useful for as long as the niche exists.
But the truly useful thing to being a tasty and easily domesticated animal is the fact that human beings will fling you to all corners of the planet so when the niche ceases to exist, there are cows all over the planet to test out their ability to adapt in a bunch of new niches.
Being widespread is a huge evolutionary advantage whether the niche ceases to exist or not.
Just look at apples, no longer confined
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Was there not something recently about a snake that reproduced asexually even tho it had gender? Something about it mixing different eggs to produce much the same effect as when mixing a egg and a sperm?
And even single cell organisms can evolve "rapidly" if there is outside pressure. Hell, we already are seeing bacteria developing resistance to our most used ways of killing them. They may even be evolving that so fast that big pharma is uninterested in researching it, as the ROI will be to low...
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> Interestingly, the U.S., European, and now these Vietnamese species all look quite similar - don't know what that means.
First guess- their probably all the same genus, and it's likely a genus that is particularly suited to such asexually reproducing hybrids ? That in itself could be a survival trait on the level of the genus as a whole. If one or both of the parent species died out the clones may still survive as it has the best genetic benefits of both.
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First guess- their probably all the same genus, and it's likely a genus that is particularly suited to such asexually reproducing hybrids ?
Good thought, but no - different families, even.
That in itself could be a survival trait on the level of the genus as a whole. If one or both of the parent species died out the clones may still survive as it has the best genetic benefits of both.
Except that the clones typically don't have the best genetic benefits of both parents, at least based on what we've seen. A genus with 10 sexual species probably has better odds of surviving than one with 5 sexual and 5 asexual species.
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>Except that the clones typically don't have the best genetic benefits of both parents, at least based on what we've seen. A genus with 10 sexual species probably has better odds of surviving than one with 5 sexual and 5 asexual species.
There is certainly some variation in this - the article even mentions the classic example - mules are hardier than either horses or donkeys despite being sterile.
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AHAHAHA - WHAT? (Score:5, Funny)
...
...
(c'mon yer leavin' me hangin'...)
.
Awesome headline (Score:1)
apropos Jurassic Park quote (Score:4, Funny)
Wow, Ian was right again ...
Predicted by The Onion (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-delicious-species-discovered,1331/
Somewhere in a Vietnamese jungle... (Score:2)
there's a crazy lizard Snoo Snoo party going on.
This just in from the field! (Score:2)
Yup tastes like chicken!
Potential Problem (Score:2)
I'll take the lizard. (Score:1)
It reminds me of Cronenberg's "eXistenZ" (Score:2)
It featured a mysterious Chinese restaurant in the middle of the Canadian wilderness that served animals that were unknown to science.
It's best watched back-to-back with "Naked Lunch".
Are they served "RARE?" (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks, I'm here all week.
According to which definition of species? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Leiolepis genus.
The only problem is that classic organization doesn't hold up well to new understandings.
An issue that will be fixed.
Same situation (Score:1)
I'm on a Mexican Radio (Score:1)
Wish I was in
Tijuana
Eating Bar B Qued iguana
Want to be a millionaire? (Score:1)
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Hrm, "Neutral_Observer" responding to a lizard in the Tropics with "eew!"
Does not compute!