Males stole the eggs of females to replicate themselves

Scientists were surprised to find a male fish stealing female eggs to produce juveniles with copies of identical genes.

In the study published in Royal Society Open Science, the scientists were surprised to find a male fish of Squalius alburnoides in Spain created an identical replica from the female egg, according to Verge.

Squalius alburnoides is a hybrid fish between two different species, one of which is now extinct. When studying 261 juveniles, scientists discovered one was the perfect copy of the fish. This is evidence of the phenomenon of males maintaining their own race without children.

The male of this fish has the ability to clone.(Photo: Verge).

The phenomenon of male spawning is very rare in nature , especially invertebrate species. This is the first time scientists have discovered this phenomenon in fish.

Scientists predict three possibilities have occurred. Males produce sperm that have twice as much genetic material as normal before stealing eggs and removing their genetic material. It is also possible that the sperm of a male is normal but the egg lacks genetic material or the two sperms fertilize an egg that lacks genes.

"In many cases, the same way of maintaining a race like this usually occurs when two inbreeding species mate in the evolutionary history and something is really wrong with this evolutionary approach," Laura Ross , evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University said.

Self-replication is the act of maintaining the breed that is uncommon in nature because it increases the risk of species when the variety of genes is reduced. If all individuals in a species have the same gene, the entire opposite species is at risk of being wiped out if the environment is highly variable.