Asexual Reproduction

Asexual reproduction is by far the most widespread reproductive strategy among simple, single-celled and lower multicellular organisms, being especially common in members of Protista, Bacteria, Archaea and multicellular organisms with a comparatively simple body organisation. Because only one parent is involved and no gametes ever form or fuse, the offspring show what is called uniparental inheritance — every individual produced is, genetically, an unmodified copy of the parent, with no shuffling or recombination of genes to introduce variation. Animals show this single-parent strategy through several distinct mechanisms, each covered in its own right in the sections that follow: fission (a parent body dividing into two or more identical daughter individuals — animals show five distinct types of fission: binary fission, multiple fission, plasmotomy, strobilation and sporulation), budding (one or more small buds growing on the parent and eventually detaching as independent young), fragmentation (the parent body breaking into pieces …