Creature clones itself to avoid becoming fish food
It's a novel escape route that makes a mockery of the status of the individual: if you run the risk of being eaten, just clone yourself. That is the approach taken by the larvae of sand dollars - marine animals related to sea urchins.
Fish are voracious predators of sand dollar larvae. Dawn Vaughn and Richard Strathmann of the University of Washington, Seattle, found that when they put four-day-old sand dollar larvae in a tank with fish mucus, the larvae cloned themselves.
They did this by either splitting in two or by producing a small bud which detached itself and developed into a new larva. Either way, the clones were smaller than the original larvae. Sand dollars did not clone themselves if there was no fish mucus in the water.