A cutting from a plant is grafted (attached ... Advantages for the plant of carrying out asexual reproduction: Only one parent plant is required. New plants are genetically identical to the ...

(Mutations do create a minor amount of change.) If asexual reproduction survives at all, conditions must sometimes favor it, even in competition for a niche with sexually reproducing species.

Those outlier liaisons gave whiptails robust heterozygosity, which has been preserved by the identical replication—essentially, cloning—that occurs in asexual reproduction. It’s a genetic ...