Correct. The animals produced by andro are basically half-clones of the male
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I may be misremembering but I read a paper some time ago and I think they were able to document it out to seventeen years. But do not quote me on that as it has been a while since I read that paper
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Komodos are Z/W
Sorry it took me a while to get here. I have been fairly busy with the start of the semester, and totally forgot about this thread. So, a female that repeatedly produced mixed sex clutches but has not been in contact with a male. What are the possibilities. Well, as pointed out here, with pythons, they have XX (female) and XY (male) sex chromosomes. So, the production of males is not possible. For males to be produced, a Y chromosome is required, and that can only come from a male. I am not aware of work describing the mutational processes required for an X to mutate to a Y, however, if that did happen, I cannot see it happening repeatedly. In all of the instances of parthenogenesis we have worked on (more than you can imagine), we have never seen a male parthenogenesis in the pythons, and never a female parthenogenesis in the advanced snakes (pit vipers, corns, kings, Thamnophis, Cobras, etc. The reason being, is that all pythons to our understanding are XX/XY. Same with Boas, with the exception of those from Madagascar. Advances snakes in contrast, to our knowledge, are all ZW (female) and ZZ (male).
So, the only way for this to happen is either incorrect sexing (not uncommon), or a male has been introduced to the female once, and sperm was stored, or yearly. I would say its the latter. Snakes can store sperm, (we have several papers on that on my website - www.booth-lab.org). Pythons seem to be able to do that over a year or two, but fertility drops dramatically. Its not uncommon for people to put animals together, even temporarily while cleaning, and for them to breed and produce offspring. I no longer offer genetic testing of parthenogenesis (of the species we already have reported it in), but Ben Morrill might still run a company that will.
Regarding androgenesis, we have a paper almost ready to submit about that. The offspring from that, from our work on androgenesis in boas and pythons, always produces females. It appears that YY is not viable.
Hope that helps clear up some things. It appear that most of it was covered above anyway.
Warren
Thank you Warren! Greatly appreciate your time and input