Baby dragons basking in newfound attention (top), and visitor information at London Zoo

When her quadruplets were born in April 2005, everyone was amazed. How could this be? She had never had a partner all her life. She lived a solitary existence without ever coming into contact with anyone from the opposite sex. And just when her guardians were toying with the idea of matchmaking, she produced four young ones. Flabbergasted, they called in reproductive biologists to solve the mystery behind what seemed like a case of “immaculate conception”.

Nearly two years down the line, the truth is finally out. Sungai had conceived and delivered the babies all on her own — her children had no paternal chromosome. A little after she laid the clutch of eggs, Sungai, the star Komodo dragon of London Zoo, died. She never saw the children she brought forth all by herself.

“Parthenogenesis” is how scientists at the University of Liverpool, who are investigating the phenomenon, described it earlier this month. Genetic fingerprinting has confirmed that Sungai’s eggs were produced by this process where an embryo can develop and grow without being fertilised by a sperm. In other words, the mother produces her own embryos inside her womb without any help from anyone.

The orphaned babies — they had only one parent, anyway — now live in the London Zoo, unaware of the huge crowds they draw for reasons more than their queer origin. The toxic saliva-producing Komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis), with a global population of around 4,000, are now on the Red List of endangered species. The “baby dragons with no dad”, as the zoo calls them, are kept in “artificial sunlight” created by ultra violet rays, essential for their healthy growth. They haven’t been named yet but thousands of suggestions have been pouring in from far and wide. It isn’t difficult to guess one of them — Jesus. As of now, the zoo authorities have painted harmless red spots on each of the babies to recognise them from a distance.

Here’s Sungai’s full story. The female Komodo dragon came to London from France’s Thoiry Zoo in the prime of her youth. The keepers had begun looking for a match for the 10-year-old — she was to be introduced to the charming and eligible male Komodo dragon, Rajah, who had just recovered from the shock of his fiancée Nina’s death.

But even before the keepers could arrange for her to begin courtship, Sungai took them unawares by laying a clutch of eggs. The obvious inference was that she had somehow sneaked an affair with Kimaan, the handsome Komodo dragon in Thoiry Zoo. But genetic tests by Phillip Watts of the University of Liverpool recently published in Nature ruled out that possibility. They revealed that Sungai was all on her own and there were no other chromosomes except hers in the babies.

“It is amazing. The mystery has finally been solved and we have an absolute miracle of science at hand,” says Richard Gibson, the curator of herpetology of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), which runs the zoo.

The story doesn’t end there. Sungai courted Rajah. The mysterious French female had a roaring affair with the lonely London widower. And just before her death, she laid another clutch of “normal” eggs, one of which gave birth to a baby dragon fathered by Rajah.

“Parthenogenesis is known in species like lower plants , invertebrates and vertebrates — some reptiles, fish and, very rarely, birds. But it was unknown in Komodo dragons,” Gibson says. The new findings that they can procreate asexually and then switch at their own sweet will to normal sexual reproduction will give the zoo authorities a new insight into breeding Komodo dragons, he says.

With the ability to procreate without males, a female Komodo dragon can mighty well swim from an island to another and give birth to a whole new population. However, there’s a flipside to this — parthenogenesis lessens the species’ genetic diversity, not something the endangered reptiles can celebrate.

Scientists have more to be amazed. In May 2006, Flora — another virgin Komodo dragon in the Chester Zoo in northern England — laid a clutch of “parthenogenic” eggs. The eggs are now on an incubator. “The incubation period for Komodo dragons’ eggs is between seven and nine months. So we expect to hear the patter of tiny claws any time now,” says Rachael Ashton of Chester Zoo.