A new study shows that New Zealand's female stick insects do not require male stick insects in order to reproduce; it is revealed that the female is not at all dependent on male insects.

The research which was carried out by Massey University's Mary Morgan-Richards says that the southern female stick insects have more tendency to carry on by themselves.

Mary Morgan-Richards work "Geographic Parthenogenesis and the Common Tea-tree Stick Insect of New Zealand" is all set to be published in the International journal Molecular Ecology. Her work explains the linkage between the sexual and genderless populations of the stick insects. She did her research in collaboration with Steve Trewick and Ian Stringer, which studied the reproduction process of the species.

They found that southern unmated females laid eggs which resulted into female offsprings only. This concept is called as parthenogenesis. Females from parthenogenic populations do have the capacity to reproduce sexually but their percentage of producing offsprings because of sex is only 10 percent.

The researchers have claimed the idea to be range expansion - where organisms keep on shifting their places from north and south according to the climatic condition.

The team studied the females which had males available but did not produce asexually even though they had the capability to do so and there were some self raised female insects which did reproduce asexually because of the lack of males.