Nov
Posted on 13th November 2007
Shockwaves rippled through the scientific community and also through most of my apartment today when I read a story on the Internet about a hammerhead shark in Omaha, Nebraska that had experienced a “virgin birth,” which is to say that it totally gave birth to a baby hammerhead shark without ever having been banged before. This news has come as a really big surprise to both shark experts and also everyone at the shark aquarium where the virgin shark birth took place because up until this point they had all been under the impression that a shark birth simply could not happen without there having been at least a little bit of shark banging going on beforehand. Also, up until this point pretty much everyone had assumed that the hammerhead shark in question was a total ho, what with her coquettish grin, the swishy way she swam around her tank, and her complete lack of effort in keeping her crazy shark vagina from public view and all. As is often the case with rumors, however, this one turned out to totally not be true. In fact, upon further investigation, it became clear that the hammerhead shark in question had never even been fingered before.
If you are as shocked by all of this as I am, I completely understand. Until now, I had generally spent little to no time each day thinking about hammerhead sharks and/or hammerhead shark vaginas. As of this writing, however, it is pretty much impossible for me to not think about hammerhead sharks and/or hammerhead shark vaginas most of the time. And as it turns out, I am not alone on this. Scientists from all over the world have been studying the case of the virgin shark birth around the clock and have come to the conclusion that the female hammerhead shark of Omaha gave birth to the baby hammerhead shark through a process known in medical circles as parthenogenesis, which is a Greek word that apparently means “hammerhead shark birth in the absence of hammerhead shark banging, especially when the hammerhead shark in question is totally not a ho even though everyone used to think that but whatever.” Greek is a seriously efficient language.
Anyway, it took a while for the scientists to decide that the hammerhead shark of Omaha did in fact experience a virgin birth since they discovered through their research that female hammerhead sharks in general often keep hammerhead shark sperm in their hammerhead shark vaginas for months at a time. This, of course, only goes to confirm what many of us knew from the beginning- female hammerhead sharks can be real skanks sometimes.
In an unexpected twist in the case of the virgin shark birth of Omaha, the baby hammerhead shark that was born during all of this actually ended up getting killed by a stingray within hours of swimming out of its mother’s weird shark vagina. This is really sad news but also kind of happy at the same time because- between the virgin birth and the dying young and all- it is hard not to think of the baby Jesus when thinking of the baby hammerhead shark. Anyway, all of this just goes to show you that it was pretty much anything goes in that crazy shark aquarium in Omaha. How that hammerhead shark managed to not end up turning into a total ho in that environment I will never know.
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