“Girls Will Be Boys: Sex Reversal in Dragon Lizards.”

David Weild

AP-Bio, C-Odd

Current Event 10

12/6/17

Professor Georges, Arthur. “Girls Will Be Boys: Sex Reversal in Dragon Lizards.” ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171205091552.htm.

For this week’s current event, I decided to review Professor Arthur George's article titled “Girls Will Be Boys: Sex Reversal in Dragon Lizards,” I chose this article because we have been learning about species changing their sex in class so I wanted to learn more about it and I saw this article. This article was about an Australian lizard species which can grow the lizard equivalent of a penis during development if need be. This was discovered when  the University of Canberra and CSIRO found this happening to the body and genitalia of male dragons which reverse their sex at high temperature treatment. The study was done with “female dragons at normal and high temperatures," Dr Weisbecker said. Then "Our team incubated 265 bearded dragon eggs at two temperatures -- either at 28 or 36 degrees Celsius, the latter of which causes genetically male dragons to reverse their sex.” In addition the team cited that "I noticed that female embryos first grew a pair of hemipenes, just like male embryos, and only lost them closer to hatching," said Ms Whiteley. Based on temperature development in snakes and lizards’ genitalia will vary. This article also states how there is not much knowledge regarding this phenomenon but there will be more research done in the future.

This article is important for a number of reasons. In society today we are dealing with lots of XY chromosome and other chromosome problems. Also there are many hermaphroditic animals and finding out the conditions that they turn genders is important because if they have to reproduce we as humans want to be able to help them continue their species to keep them alive

This article was very strong but the author still could have done some things better. For example, the article did a great job describing the study. Also, he described certain parts using quotes from the research team. As well as this he describes the lizard’s origins and tells the reader what the article will be about in the first two sentences and the title. One thing the author can do better is tell the reader where he will go from having this data and what he plans to do with it and plan further experiments. I felt like I was left hanging at the end of the article because there was not really a proper ending.