Many parthenogens, including the pathenogenetic Bynoe's geckoes, arrise through hybridisation events. The geckoes I have available come from populations/races/species/ which made some of the natural hybrid parthenogens, so presumably, if they reproduced together, there would be a very high chance of the offspring being parthenogens, and unlike all the extant Binoei parthenogens, these would be diploid rather than triploid. In the first generation there would be males, but their gametes would be useless, unlike the females' which can carry on developing as though they had been fertilised (you can't have a 'fertilised' sperm). It is highly probably that this is caused by problems during meiosis due to the chromosomes not matching up properly, but I'm yet to fully get my head around the triploid meiosis anomolies.
You may be interested to know that the grasshoppers I'm currently working on are genetically similar in terms of the origin of their parthenogenesis, although unlike the geckoes, they stopped at diploid parthenogens. We have made synthetic parthenogenetic Warramaba grasshoppers in the lab, from the ancestral species (the thing I've been unable to do with the geckoes for some unknown reason) and interestingly, you can backcross a diploid parthenogenetic Warramaba (either natural or synthetic) to a sexual male and get a synthetic triploid parthenogen... why they have stopped at diploid in the wild is a bit of a mystery.... so far! (hopefully we'll work it out). The next step after confirming that the offspring from these geckoes I'm offering were diploid parthenogens would be to attempt a backcross, which I speculate would be easier than the first cross. By the way, this goes against what you're saying in that the females would just clone themselves - they can actually add an extra set of chromosomes into the nucleus of their egg, even the tripoid parthenogens can sometimes do this and occasional tetraploids pop up (only identifiable using molecular techniques). These tetraploids will occasionally lose a set of chromosomes (during meiosis I believe) (not necessarily the last one their obtained) and go back to being triploid.
By the way, would you call the natural parthenogenetic 'hoppers and geckoes I'm going on about intergrades?
Hehe, I've forced myself to stay out of that diamond carpet intergrade discussion... I think some of the APS folk should come to the lab and discuss all their amazing genetics knowledge with us, because some of them talk about stuff which would be unfathomable to all the proffessional geneticists at work! If you can teach us how to do some of the things you say is possible, we'll pay you handsomely! (No offense to those of you who obviously do know your stuff, or to anyone else who isn't boldly claiming that geneticists can do the impossible).
Oh, some of this may remind some of you about the glossary thread... I recommend
www.dictionary.com or, alternatively,
www.google.com will lead you to what you need. I don't think an APS glossary is the best way to go about it, but if you go for it, let's hope it goes well. Whatever you use, I'd thoroughly recommend anyone interested in biology, (or stuff in general) to look up words you see and aren't familiar with, it's so easy to build your vocabulary these days with
www.dictionary.com at your finger tips while reading what may at first seem like gibberish.
I hope I haven't rambled too much. You can probably tell I love this area and can get excited about discussing it
I kept it as short as I could.
