Re: Do animals that reproduce asexaly have gender?

Do asexual creatures have gender?

There are two ways to answer this question. They both rely upon what you 
mean by sex and gender. To many people the two words mean exactly the same 
thing. To others, sex has a meaning that is restricted to the biological 
differences of male and female, while gender refers to behavioral roles 
that are usually associated with the biological sex differences, but do 
not have to be. For example, when I was growing up we all “knew” that boys 
had short hair and girls had long hair. We treated that as a sex 
difference, but it was really a gender difference. Boys tended to have 
shorter hair, but of course they were perfectly capable of growing their 
hair longer. Similarly, girls tended to have longer hair, but they could 
cut it short any time they wanted to. In this case, hair length was a 
behavioral choice that was associated with the sex of the individual, but 
not caused by sex. That makes it a gender difference and not a sex 
difference.

Now to answer your question. Asexual literally means without sex. Some 
creatures are capable of reproducing without a partner. This is more 
common in plants than it is in animals, but we do see it in both kingdoms. 
In these cases, the distinctions of male and female have no meaning. So, 
you could say that these creatures have no sex distinctions. If you use 
the word gender to mean the same as sex, then you could also say that 
these creatures have no gender distinctions.

But, if you use the definition of gender that focuses on behavior, then 
you can find these differences in asexual creatures. Creatures that invest 
more effort into fewer offspring as a reproductive strategy are displaying 
a typically “female” behavior and you could label these creatures as 
gender female (some scientists would say these are “K” behaviors). 
Creatures that display a reproductive strategy that invests less effort in 
the individual offspring but instead produces a greater total number of 
offspring are displaying a typically “male” behavior and you could label 
these creatures a gender male (some scientists would say these are “r” 
behaviors).

It really comes down to how you want to define gender, and how you want to 
label behaviors. If you want to, you can find gender differences in just 
about everything. On the other hand, you want to be careful that the 
gender differences you find are saying something useful about the creature 
instead of saying something about how you identify and associate behaviors 
with males and females.