When Pseudosex Is Better Than the Real Thing

Decades ago, behavioral neurobiologist David Crews read a strange report about the desert grassland whiptail, a small, slender lizard that lives in the sagebrush of the American Southwest. The paper claimed that the species was entirely female, and reproduced by cloning. It tested the limits of what Crews felt to be biologically plausible in higher vertebrates. “I didn’t believe that such a thing existed,” he says. But he was curious, and a friend who was going to New Mexico offered to collect some from the wild. Crews, who at the time was at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, installed a half-dozen whiptail lizards in glass tanks in his animal room. One day, he noticed a lizard biting at her cagemate’s rear legs and tail, and soon after that, riding atop her. Crews instantly recognized that they were doing what lizards do when they have sex. But why would two females simulate the act of mating?

“I literally fell out of my chair trying to get to my camera,” Crews says. “In those days, you’d keep the film in the freezer, and I’m trying to cram it into the camera so I could document it, because at that time I thought it was rare—just weird.” He snapped photos as the two adopted the “donut” pose—a contorted mating posture in which the top lizard twists around and bites the belly of the other.

Crews, now a professor of zoology and psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, looked beyond the possibility that the whiptails were just