Abstract Sex and mitochondria are inextricably linked in the eukaryotic tree of life, a confounding situation given the uniparental inheritance of mitochondria and the biparental inheritance that sexual reproduction entails. Unisexual vertebrate lineages, which arise via hybridization and asexually pass on their genetic material to clonal descendants, provide a unique opportunity to study mitochondrial evolution without potentially confounding effects of sex. Hybridity and clonality set unisexua