Question

2a. Does your baby dragon have exactly the same phenotypic traits as his or her same-sex parent?

Answer 1

No the baby dragon does not exactly has the same phenotypic traits as his or her same-sex parents as the baby dragon is born to her mother by meiosis that occurred in the mother`s sex cells(oogenesis) that resulted in haploid ova and gametic fusion with the sperm that also formed due to meiosis (spermatogenesis) in father dragon. The fusion of sperm and ova resulted in a zygote that developed eventually to form a foetus and then it came out of the mother`s womb to become a baby dragon.

Now phenotypic traits depend on the genotype present in the baby dragon. In turn, the genotype is determined by the combination of genes of both the parents as in the baby dragon one set of chromosomes came from its mother and other set came from its father. Thus it is a kind of sexual reproduction where genetic recombination takes place every time a baby is born and due to this, every time the baby is born it is different from its siblings and also from either of the parents. Obviously, there are some similarities as the genes, it has inherited, is from both the parents, hence to an extent it is similar to both its parents but it is not a replica of either of the parents.

This can only happen in asexual reproduction where the offsprings produced are exactly the clone of their parents as here only a single parent is involved in contrast to sexual reproduction where two parents are involved.