COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho -- A northern Idaho prosecutor won't bring hate crime charges against an 18-year-old accused of shouting a racist slur at members of the Utah women's basketball team during the NCAA tournament.

The deputy attorney for the city of Coeur d'Alene made the announcement Monday, writing in a charging decision document that although the use of the slur was "detestable" and "incredibly offensive," there wasn't evidence suggesting that the man was threatening physical harm to the women or to their property. That means the conduct is protected by the First Amendment and can't be charged under Idaho's malicious harassment law, Ryan Hunter wrote.

The members of the University of Utah basketball team were staying at a Coeur d'Alene hotel in March as they competed at the NCAA tournament in nearby Spokane, Washington. Team members were walking from a hotel to a restaurant when they said a truck drove up and the driver yelled a racist slur at the group. After the team left the restaurant, the same driver returned and was "reinforced by others." They were revving their engines and yelling again at the players, said Tony Stewart, an official with the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, during a news conference shortly after the event.

The encounters were so disturbing that they left the group concerned about its safety, Utah coach Lynne Roberts said a few days later.

Far-right extremists have maintained a presence in the region for years. In 2018, at least nine hate groups operated in the region of Spokane and northern Idaho, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

"We had several instances of some kind of racial hate crimes toward our program and [it was] incredibly upsetting for all of us," Roberts said. "In our world, in athletics and in university settings, it's shocking. There's so much diversity on a college campus and so you're just not exposed to that very often."

University of Utah officials declined to comment about the prosecutor's decision.

In the document detailing the decision, Hunter said police interviewed nearly two dozen witnesses and pored over hours of surveillance video. Several credible witnesses described a racist slur being hurled at the group as it walked to dinner, but descriptions of the vehicle and the person who shouted the slur varied, and police weren't able to hear any audio of the yelling on the surveillance tapes.

There also wasn't any evidence to connect the encounter before the team arrived at the restaurant with what happened as it left, Hunter wrote. Still, police were able to identify the occupants of a silver passenger vehicle involved in the second encounter, and one of them -- an 18-year-old high school student -- reportedly confessed to shouting a slur and an obscene statement at the group, Hunter said.

Prosecutors considered whether to bring three possible charges against the man -- malicious harassment, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace -- but decided they didn't have enough evidence to support any of the three charges.

That's because Idaho's hate crime law makes racial harassment a crime only if it is done with the intent to either threaten or cause physical harm to a person or to their property. The man who shouted the slur told police he did it because he thought it would be funny, Hunter wrote.

"Setting aside the rank absurdity of that claim and the abjectly disgusting thought process required to believe it would be humorous to say something that abhorrent," it undermines the premise that the man had the specific intent to intimidate and harass, Hunter wrote.

The hateful speech also didn't meet the requirements of Idaho's disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace laws, which are mainly about when and where noise or unruly behavior occurs. The slurs were shouted on a busy thoroughfare during the early evening hours, and so the noise level wasn't unusual for that time and place.

Hunter wrote that his office shares in the outrage sparked by the man's "abhorrently racist and misogynistic statement, and we join in unequivocally condemning that statement and the use of a racial slur in this case, or in any circumstance. However that cannot, under current law, form the basis for criminal prosecution in this case."

The First Amendment protects even hateful or offensive speech, said Aaron Terr, the public advocacy director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which advocates for freedom of speech and thought.

"While that means we sometimes have to hear speech we loathe, it's an important principle because the only alternative is for the government to decide when speech is too offensive. That's a subjective judgment, and it would open the door to the government arbitrarily suppressing views it doesn't like," Terr said.

There are a few exceptions to the First Amendment, Terr said, but they are narrow and well-defined.

"For example the First Amendment doesn't protect true threats, which are statements expressing a serious intent to cause physical harm to an individual or to place them in fear of physical harm," Terr said. "Incitement is also unprotected, but to qualify as incitement, the speech must be intended to and likely to cause immediate unlawful action."

Between 2000 and 2015 in an affluent, predominately white community in the US, 19 young people died by suicide through what’s known as suicide clusters. These clusters refer to an unusually high rate of suicide for a community over a short period of time, often at least two deaths and one suicide attempt, or three deaths. Suicide clusters are an extreme example of youth mental health struggles — an issue that’s been getting more attention since the pandemic and one that’s at the center of an increasingly charged national conversation around social media and phones.

Anna Mueller, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, and Seth Abrutyn, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia, recently published Life Under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them, which explores why these clusters happened and how to prevent more. The researchers embedded themselves within the community (which goes by the pseudonym Poplar Grove) to understand the social conditions that preceded and followed the teenagers’ deaths.

Senior policy reporter Rachel Cohen spoke with Mueller and Abrutyn about the youth mental health crisis, the crucial role and responsibility of adults, and how kids take behavioral cues from those around them. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Rachel Cohen

There’s been a lot of confusing and often conflicting reports about youth suicide trends, especially since the pandemic. Can you outline for readers what we know?

Anna Mueller

Since 2007, rates of youth suicide in the United States have been increasing pretty significantly and substantially. Not all countries around the world are experiencing this, though some others are.

With the pandemic, I feel like I have to plead the fifth since the suicide data is still sort of inconclusive. For some kids, the pandemic was really hard in terms of mental health. For others, it actually took some pressures away.

Rachel Cohen

Do we know why youth suicide in the US started going up in 2007? What are the best theories?

Seth Abrutyn

It’s a complicated question. As you’re probably aware, there’s been some recent very public academics like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge who have been studying the relationship between social media and mental health, especially among adolescent girls. So there’s some argument that that’s part of it. Of course, that wouldn’t explain why it started in 2007, when social media and smartphones were not really ubiquitous in the way they are now, but it probably plays a role in accelerating or amplifying some of the underlying things that were happening prior.

Another part of the explanation might be that efforts to destigmatize mental health have given people greater license to talk about their mental health. So things that may have been hiding are now out there more, though that doesn’t necessarily explain why suicide rates have gone up, but it may help understand the context.

Kids today are growing up in an extremely destabilized environment, and the economy is extremely precarious. Add that to the fact that since 2007, LGBTQ kids have been able to be more freely out, which also then causes more attention to them and invites more backlash.

Anna Mueller

Everybody asks us that, and I’ll be honest with you, it’s my least favorite question because we just don’t have great data to assess any of these theories. A lot of this really just remains speculation. Social media is something important to consider, but I take a little bit of an issue with the theory that it’s what we should solely be focused on. It’s sort of an excuse to ignore other social problems, like the fact that over that same period, rates of school shootings have increased substantially, and now make things like lockdown drills a normal part of our children’s lives.

There’s also been increasing awareness that climate change is a fundamental threat to everyone’s ability to survive and that the cost of college has wildly increased. So we have a lot of pretty challenging things going on.

Rachel Cohen

I was going to ask you about phones — since as you note there’s a ton of debate right now about their role contributing to worsening mental health, but they didn’t really come up in your book. What role did you see phones play in your research on teen suicide?

Anna Mueller

Phones facilitated kids talking privately and in spaces that adults couldn’t access. And they meant kids had access to information that their parents weren’t aware they received, like kids would often find out a friend had died by suicide by text. I think that’s something adults need to be really aware of — it means the burden is on us to have meaningful conversations with kids about mental health, suicide, and how to get help because we may not be aware when our kid gets hit with some information that’s going to be relevant.

Rachel Cohen

But did it seem like the smartphones were causing the mental health problems?

Seth Abrutyn

Social media didn’t even really come up in the book. When we were in the field [back in 2013–2016], Instagram was out, but it was really more a photographic, artistic thing. Instagram wasn’t about influencers, and Facebook, Vine, and Snapchat were around but kids didn’t all have smartphones yet. Flip phones were still quite available.

I think in our original fieldwork, a lot of the young adults were far more impacted by the internet, like they sat at home on a laptop or something like that. In our new fieldwork, what we see are kids who carry the internet on their phones wherever they go. Quickly we’ve habituated to the ubiquity of smartphones and social media.

Rachel Cohen

In your research, some of the teenagers who died by suicide had loving parents, friends, romantic partners. They didn’t necessarily have mental illness. Can you talk about what you learned with respect to risk factors and protective factors?

Anna Mueller

In the community where we were working, it was a lot of popular kids who had seemingly perfect lives who were dying by suicide. Some of them probably did have undiagnosed mental illnesses, you know, there was some evidence that they were struggling with things like deep depression or eating disorders or other things. But it was never visible. And so what the community saw was this perfect kid just gone for no reason.

It is tough, because on the one hand, what we learned was that this community had really intense expectations for what a good kid and a good family and a good life looked like. And so for kids who didn’t have a lot of life experience to know that there are a lot of options out there for how else to be in this world — they really struggled. Things that helped were having family or other adult mentors who could put things in perspective.

Rachel Cohen

Life Under Pressure is about youth suicide clusters, and I wanted to ask if you could talk more about this idea of “social contagion,” which comes up several times in your book. It seems community leaders were really nervous about saying or doing the wrong thing in the wake of a youth suicide for fear of contributing to another teenager deciding to take their own life. What does the research on social contagion in this context look like?

Anna Mueller

Exposure to suicide, either the attempt or death of somebody that a kid cares about — whether they admire them, identify with them, or really love them — can be a pretty painful experience. Suicide is often about escaping pain, and so seeing people role model suicide can increase that vulnerability for kids. Our work suggests that it’s not just pre-existing risk factors, there’s something uniquely painful about exposure to suicide that can introduce suicide as a new way to cope.

Seth Abrutyn

If we take a step back, suicide is just like almost anything else. Smoking cigarettes, watching television, all the things that we end up doing and liking — a lot of it we’re learning from the people around us. And people are exceptionally vulnerable to influential others. That could be someone that’s very high status that we look up to like a popular kid in school, or it could just be a really close friend that we trust a lot.

In the community, where there are these high-status popular kids dying by suicide, if the messaging is not done correctly by adults, if we don’t have adults who can actually help talk through what’s going on and help kids grieve appropriately, the story can easily become, well, for kids who are under pressure and feel distressed, suicide is an option.

Rachel Cohen

The idea of social contagion has been coming up a lot in debates around youth gender transition too. Some adults say kids are being unduly influenced by their friends and social media regarding things like taking puberty blockers or pursuing gender-affirming surgeries. Other research contests the idea that social contagion is a factor, and some advocates say even the suggestion that gender identity may be susceptible to peer influence is offensive. Does your research in this area offer us any insights here, any more nuanced ways to think about this?

Anna Mueller

I’m not answering this. We can’t answer this. Sorry. We have ongoing work, and we can’t go there. And I don’t know the literature and we can’t go there.

Rachel Cohen

Okay, so you don’t think it’s applicable — the social contagion research you’ve studied in the youth suicide context — to other contexts?

Seth Abrutyn

The only thing I would say is I think the word “contagion” is the word that’s problematic. We’ve tried to actually change that in our own research, and there’s pushback because it’s relatively accepted. It has a sort of folk meaning that everybody can kind of grasp on. The problem is it sounds like how people get the flu in a dormitory, right? But just because everyone shares a heating system and air conditioning system doesn’t mean it will spread like wildfire.

Sociologists don’t think of it that way. When behaviors and beliefs spread, it’s usually because people talk about them with each other, or watch people do something and then talk about it. And then they can text that to their friends and talk about it with each other, and in that sense it is contagious, if you want to call it that. I would call it more like diffusion.

Rachel Cohen

Part of your book is about the need to talk more openly about mental health issues. There’s been this public conversation recently about whether there’s been inadvertent consequences in the push to destigmatize mental illness, with one being that young people may now have become so familiar with the language and frameworks of psychiatric illness that youth can get locked into seeing themselves as unwell.

Oxford professor Lucy Foulkes coined the term prevalence inflation to describe the way that some people consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to interpret normal problems of life as signs of decline in mental health, and she warned of self-fulfilling spirals. Psychology professor Darby Saxbe also noted that teenagers, who are still developing their identities, may be particularly susceptible to taking psychological labels to heart. I wanted to invite you to weigh in on these questions and debate.

Anna Mueller

I’m not sure that I find that idea to be really useful. One of the problems with adults right now is that we’re not listening to the pain that kids are experiencing, or taking it seriously. If I were to advocate for something, I would advocate for seriously listening to kids about their struggles and sources of pain, and working to build a world where kids feel like they matter. Obviously, helping kids build resiliency is incredibly important. We can do a better job at helping our kids navigate challenges, and I’m an advocate of letting kids fail, the road shouldn’t just be perfectly smooth. But I’m pretty fundamentally uncomfortable with not listening to kids’ voices.

Rachel Cohen

I don’t think anyone’s saying don’t listen to kids, but they’re saying that if you encourage kids to think of themselves as anxious, and if you give kids those certain frameworks to diagnose or understand their problems, and as you noted earlier a lot of this information is coming from social media —

Anna Mueller

We think of frames as ways for kids to express themselves. As adults, it’s our job to dig deeper into how they’re framing their lives. Can suicide be an idiom of distress? Yes. Research has shown that some kids use the language of suicide as a way to express themselves to the adults in their lives. Similar things with anxiety, but then our job is to unpack that and discover what does that mean.

Seth Abrutyn

I think what Anna is trying to say, and what our book is trying to say, is that adults are really responsible for the worlds these youth inhabit. And these anxiety frames maybe are something that spreads around on TikTok, but it’s also something that’s being generated by adults, and it’s actually something being generated from real things in their lives, like school shootings.

The way that we talk about them, and the way that we don’t listen to them, is maybe not helpful to kids. As a sociologist, we’re sitting there thinking how do we make schools better places? Well, what are adults doing? How are we making schools safer spaces so that this anxiety frame is not something kids are talking about?

Rachel Cohen

What are the big questions researchers are still grappling with when it comes to youth suicide?

Anna Mueller

I know one thing that emerged for me and Seth after our book is how can we look at how suicide prevention is enacted in the school building, so that we’re catching kids before they get to that? Since we did the fieldwork for Life Under Pressure, our research has involved working collaboratively with schools to strengthen kids’ ability to get meaningful care. We have begun to see some differences in how schools approach suicide prevention that are actually really salient to whether the school experiences an enduring suicide problem or recurring suicide clusters.

Seth Abrutyn

Most schools know that trusted adults are a really important part of the school building. And so thinking about how do we get teachers to do little things, like one school building made sure every teacher between classes was outside of their room for five minutes, just standing in the hallway, just saying hi, smiling, and pointing out that you were there. We often think those things don’t make a big impact, but it does. If a kid is not having a good day, maybe they’re not the most popular kid, but if they see that someone remembers them, someone knows them, it makes a real difference.

Charlotte the stingray was pregnant. That in and of itself was not all that exciting but, according to the staff at the North Carolina aquarium where she is based, Charlotte also hadn’t come into contact with a male of her species for eight years. She’d been living in a tank with two sharks, and no male rays. Which left people all across the internet wondering: Who was the father of her embryos?

The most likely answer, according to most researchers, was ... no one. There was no father. Charlotte, they believed, had produced these embryos solo, in a process known as parthenogenesis — a form of asexual reproduction.

More specifically, Charlotte probably engaged in something called facultative parthenogenesis, where a species that normally reproduces sexually decides to take this more DIY route. In this particular form of parthenogenesis, a female creates an egg, but instead of the egg merging with a sperm cell, it somehow merges with another egg-like cell. It’s not cloning — the egg and the egg-like cell have a mixed-up version of the female’s genes — but the end result is that the female makes an embryo all by herself.

As the aquarium explained in a video, Charlotte’s unusual pregnancy isn’t predictable, so researchers aren’t sure when Charlotte will give birth. But once scientists test Charlotte’s progeny, she may prove to be the first documented case of facultative parthenogenesis in her species, the round stingray.

Mystery solved. Except ... Charlotte’s story actually points us to a bigger mystery that some scientists are puzzling over: not so much how animals like Charlotte are getting themselves pregnant as why they are doing it.

It might seem, based on the fact that Charlotte could be the first documented case of a round ray reproducing this way, as though parthenogenesis is a really rare, special occurrence. Miraculous, almost, like the stingray equivalent of the immaculate conception. (And believe me, on places like TikTok, the comparison was made. A lot.)

But Alexis Sperling, a University of Cambridge biologist who studies parthenogenesis, says Charlotte’s situation is actually not as unusual as we might think.

“[Parthenogenesis] is probably a lot more common and a lot more widespread than we even know yet,” she told me.

Parthenogenesis is fairly common and varied in insects, but lots of vertebrates can do it too. Decades ago, scientists noted that they’d found examples in every vertebrate class except mammals. (Sorry, Mary.) In 2011, a review paper found more than 80 examples. But even then, scientists started to realize that they may have “underestimated” how common it is in vertebrates, and they keep adding new examples to the record: the parthenogenetic condors a few years ago, the parthenogenetic crocodile last year, new and old examples in species of sharks, snakes, lizards, and even other species of ray.

One researcher I spoke to, Warren Booth at Virginia Tech, told me he once believed parthenogenesis was pretty rare in snakes. Then he published a paper about parthenogenesis in one species, and suddenly snake breeders and researchers started sending him specimens and accounts of parthenogenesis from all kinds of reptile species.

“I had a freezer full of parthenogens, just chilling out,” he told me. Eventually, he changed universities, but until that point, he claims, “I had a hundred and something parthenogens that were sitting in that freezer.”

So all sorts of vertebrates seem to at least be capable of knocking themselves up through parthenogenesis. But again: Why?

On this week’s episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s science podcast, we talk to two scientists, each with a very different answer to that question.

Parthenogenesis, less as a “Virgin Mary” situation and more as a “Hail Mary” pass

Christine Dudgeon is one of the people poking around on the question of why so many vertebrates can do this solo tango. She’s a biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia, who studies sharks and rays, and as she explains it, she stumbled into studying parthenogenesis by accident.

She was trying to study some zebra sharks at an aquarium in Queensland. And while she was doing her work, a zebra shark named Leonie, who was living in a tank with no males, had not one but two rounds of parthenogenetic eggs.

Parthenogenesis had been observed in zebra sharks before. But, as Dudgeon puts it, “In all the previous cases, the documents were of animals who reached maturity in an aquarium setting and had never had exposure to a male.”

This shark, however, was no Virgin Leonie. She had been exposed to males before. In fact, she had had some babies previously, the old-fashioned way. So it was almost like she was toggling parthenogenesis on after having had it shut off, like flipping a switch. And while this kind of switching between sexual and asexual reproduction had been documented in, for example, insects, and would soon be documented in both a snake and an eagle ray, Dudgeon was really surprised to see it in a shark. It got her thinking.

“Rather than it just being this kind of anomalous thing, like a mistake, which was the prevailing concept,” she says, “perhaps this is actually some sort of strategy.”

This is all speculative, but the hypothesis that Dudgeon is playing with is that, for some vertebrates, facultative parthenogenesis might be like the evolutionary equivalent of a Hail Mary pass.

Her logic goes like this: For most animals, sexual reproduction is a better option than parthenogenesis. It gives their babies more diverse genes, and that makes them stronger. But if there are no males around and sexual reproduction is off the table, then maybe something can be triggered in some females’ bodies, letting them pursue this alternative. So a shark like Leonie, removed from males for a long time, could start taking new measures.

For some species, like chickens, parthenogenesis would actually allow a female to make a male to reproduce with. Which is kind of incestuous, but — at least hypothetically, Dudgeon says — it might be better than nothing.

For other species, like zebra sharks, the babies that come out of these parthenogenetic births are always female. So the females can’t make themselves incestuous mates. But Dudgeon still thinks that parthenogenesis could be useful here.

“My current thinking,” she says, “is that it essentially extends the life of the egg cell.”

If the egg cell stays inside the mother and no male shows up, the egg cell dies when the mother dies. But if the mother turns that egg into a female baby, then that female could outlive her and carry her genetic information out into the world.

“And then, hopefully, the female would find a male to reproduce with to then maintain that genetic diversity,” Dudgeon says.

She can imagine a lot of instances where this might be useful. First, in the context of the immense ocean, Dudgeon says it could be hard to find mates across great distances, and this kind of trick to extend your genetic information into another generation might come in handy sometimes. But she’s also interested in the idea of founder populations, where an animal is, say, blown across a barrier like the ocean and on to an island, where it then multiplies, and eventually differentiates into a new species.

“Has [parthenogenesis] had a role in that in some way?” she wonders. “Does it play a role in that for vertebrates as well as invertebrates?”

If Dudgeon’s hypothesis is correct, then this form of parthenogenesis might be a new reproductive strategy for biologists like her to explore. Some of the researchers I reached out to thought this was plausible. Others, though, were more skeptical.

Parthenogenesis as a vestigial tailbone

Much like Christine Dudgeon, Warren Booth also stumbled into parthenogenesis by accident. It all started around 2010, when Booth was a postdoctoral student, and a breeder called him up, asking him to do a paternity test on her snake.

She was reaching out to Booth specifically because he had developed a set of DNA markers that would let him trace genetics in boa constrictors. This wasn’t his main focus. Technically, Booth is a bug guy. His research focus is urban entomology — that’s what he studies now at Virginia Tech, and what he was studying as a postdoc. But, as a kind of hobby and side project, he also keeps and breeds snakes because he enjoys them and likes producing different kinds of colors and pattern variations. So he had, and has, a toe in the world of reptiles.

This breeder told him that her boa constrictor had had a bunch of albino babies; they were caramel albinos, which not only gives them a pretty pink and yellow pattern, but also makes them fairly valuable. And she had housed her boa with a bunch of males, so she wanted to know which of those males was the father of these special, pricy snake babies.

As a postdoc, Booth was trying very hard to find a faculty job, to keep pursuing the science that he was so interested in. Running paternity tests on a snake wasn’t exactly what he was hoping to do with his career.

“I thought it was just the end of the end of the world,” he jokes.

But he figured, sure. He could be the Maury Povich of snakes and figure out who this snake’s dad was. The breeder sent him some snake skin — skin from the mother, her offspring, and the males she’d been housed with — and he ran some tests to compare bits of their DNA. And then he got the results: None of the males was a match.

“It turned out ... there was no father,” Booth says, “It was parthenogenesis.”

This was the first documented case of parthenogenesis in boa constrictors, so he wrote it up in a scientific article. That’s when people started contacting him about all kinds of parthenogenetic snakes and reptiles. It’s also when he started getting the firsthand experience with parthenogens that makes him doubt that vertebrates use parthenogenesis as a Hail Mary pass to keep their genes going for another generation.

Booth actually asked the snake breeder if she would send him one of the albino snake babies so he could learn more about it. She agreed to ship him one in the mail, which is apparently a thing you can do with snakes. (Warren assures me you can easily “overnight them with FedEx.” I have not tested this, but there are lots of instructions online.)

When this baby snake arrived, Booth was, in fact, able to raise it. But the snake was kind of odd.

“It was shorter than similar-aged, sexually produced individuals,” Booth remembers, “And when it reproduced it behaved totally differently.”

Normally, Booth told me, when boas are pregnant, they kind of bask in the hotter end of their tanks. But he says that this snake stayed in the cool end instead. And when it did finally produce its offspring, he says the litter was small, and half the offspring were stillborn.

Then, he says, there was the parthenogenetic ball python family from the UK. Someone sent him a python that was born via parthenogenesis and her daughter, who was also born by parthenogenesis — first- and second-generation parthenogens.

Booth says the second-generation parthenogen died relatively quickly. He was, however, able to get the first-generation parthenogen to reproduce again — sexually, this time. But like the albino boa constrictor, Booth says, this parthenogen was super weird about things.

“She sat in the cool end instead of the hot end,” he remembers, “She produced six eggs, of which five died, essentially. [They] went bad within the first couple of days.”

According to Booth, this all fits a bigger pattern. A lot of parthenogens die as embryos, and those that make it don’t do all that well. And this kind of makes sense when you look at the genetics. Because, in this form of parthenogenesis, the babies wind up with less genetic variation than their parents.

“It makes them the most inbred thing that you can think of in a vertebrate system,” Booth says, “So they’re ... they’re not that great.”

That’s why Booth doesn’t think it really makes sense to think of this as a reproductive Hail Mary pass.

At least in the snakes he’s looked at, he thinks these offspring are just too inbred to meaningfully carry along the torch to another generation. Instead, he thinks that this ability to sort of randomly, occasionally reproduce parthenogenetically is genetic. (This has been demonstrated to be true in fruit flies, but not in other animals.) If that’s the case, he says, then this is potentially just a vestigial thing that popped out in some ancient vertebrate ancestor and that it’s being passed along from generation to generation. But the species would be fine if it eventually faded out.

“My feeling is that these are very ancient traits that are not detrimental, they’re not beneficial. As a result, they’re just kind of meandering their way along through lineages,” Booth says, “They’re not being lost because they don’t kill the female, right? So therefore it’s a trait that is just maintained.”

This would be the equivalent of, say, our tailbones. They’re not actively harming us, so there’s no evolutionary push to eliminate them. But no one’s saying, “Check out the tailbone on that guy. I would really like to tailbone him immediately.” They’re not helping us thrive or reproduce. And if parthenogens are inbred weirdos that can’t really reproduce successfully, then maybe parthenogenesis isn’t a strategic ploy. Maybe, it’s just a tailbone.

Parthenogenesis is an encyclopedia waiting to be researched

Dudgeon is happy to admit that Booth might be right.

“It [parthenogenesis] could be sort of an evolutionary artifact,” she says.

But she doesn’t think that Booth’s weird snakes totally undermine her hypothesis.

Basically, she says that yes, most vertebrates produced through this kind of facultative parthenogenesis might be inbred flops. She acknowledges that most parthenogens die early. But the whole point of a Hail Mary pass is that it’s a long shot. It is probably not going to make it, but it’s better than not doing anything at all.

“It might be a case that this is the ultimate lottery,” she says. “That if you are a parthenote embryo and you’re the one that actually makes it through to adulthood, maybe you got all the good genes, right? Perhaps the ones that do make it are the superstars genetically.”

So maybe Dudgeon is right and there’s some kind of an evolutionary strategy at play here. Maybe Booth is right and parthenogenesis is just a vestigial relic. Maybe both of them are right and parthenogenesis is more of a strategy for some vertebrates than others, say. Or maybe they’re both wrong and something else is going on.

One thing they both acknowledge is that there just needs to be a lot more research done here to get better answers.

“Most of the work that we have really is from animals in human care,” Dudgeon says. “So what about the wild? What’s going on in the wild?”

There are only a couple of papers documenting vertebrates doing this type of parthenogenesis in the wild — one of them co-authored by Booth. In part, that’s just because it’s really hard to spot parthenogenesis in the wild. Researchers cannot monitor wild animals as easily as they can in zoos and aquariums, to know whether or not they’ve been near males, or to check out their eggs to see if they have some surprising embryos in there. But if they want to really answer questions about what role parthenogenesis plays in vertebrate reproduction, they need to know way more about what it looks like in nature.

They also need to answer questions about which species can do this, and why it seems like mammals don’t do it. They need to figure out how, exactly, this particular form of parthenogenesis works and what role genes play. That’s work that Alexis Sperling started on, investigating the workings of parthenogenesis in fruit flies. And, as she puts it, there’s lots more research to do on animals outside of just vertebrates; animals like insects.

In fact, when I asked Sperling if she thought that research into parthenogenesis might be a whole new chapter in our understanding of reproduction, she went even bigger.

“There’s like ... a whole set of encyclopedias waiting to be fully researched,” she said.