Polyembryony: An Evolutionary Debate

Abstract

The tendency of recruitment of offspring at a maximum level is customary among biological species. To ensure the same various strategies have been developed by various group of organisms. Of these, binary fission, multiple fission, fragmentation, budding, vegetative propagation, sporogenesis are means of asexual mode of recruitment. Though parthenogenesis is very much involved with the female gamete where the offspring is produced by female without participation of male gamete could be considered as a passage towards sexual reproduction. According to some authorities, parthenogenesis is one kind of asexual reproduction while many authorities opined that parthenogenesis is a derivative of normal sexual reproduction. However, to get the quality offspring some biological species have evolved the process of recruitment of a good number of offspring following sexual reproduction on way of producing many embryos either individually in respect to union of male gamete with the female ones or from an embryo through cloning devices. Perhaps, to overcome hurdles, on way of evolution, polyembryony is emerged to produce individual with many upcoming characters in biology. But the fact is very much involved with the sexual reproduction even after the production of embryo from a zygote. This sort of recruiting mechanism in organisms is not only an aspect of evolutionary debate but also a question of analysis whether this type of recruitment behavior is influenced by the asexual recruitment devices.