A female blacktip shark in Virginia delivered a pup in spite of no contact with any male shark for about eight years.

Tidbit, as the blacktip shark was named, experienced a "virgin birth” as she fertilized her own egg without any male companionship of the same species. This is called parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction in which females produce eggs that develop without fertilization.

By means of DNA fingerprinting techniques employed in human paternity tests, the baby of the mother shark (which lived at the Virginia Aquarium) was found to contain no genetic material from a father shark.

Shortly after birth, Tidbit was brought to the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach, where it lived for about eight years. The female didn’t have contact with any males of her kind, said researcher Beth Firchau, the aquarium's curator of fishes.

“We have never observed her in reproductive behavior or showing typical signs of having been bred,” Firchau said.

This is not the first case of virgin pregnancy in sharks that has been reported. Last May, a female hammerhead that resided at a zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, gave birth to a baby regardless of the fact that she had no contact with any male sharks for at least three years.

On the topic of parthenogenesis, Demian Chapman, a shark scientist with the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University in New York, said it is “reasonable” to take for granted the fact that female sharks are able to do this from time to time.."I'm sure this happens in the wild, but haven't been able to prove it yet. There's no reason that keeping a shark in captivity would cause a fundamental change in the reproductive system," Chapman said.