Cloning element finders

While researching available ElementFinder and ElementArrayFinder methods, I've noticed that there is a clone() method which is briefly documented:

Create a shallow copy of ElementFinder.

From what I understand, clone() is not coming from WebdriverJS and is a protractor-specific function. What I don't understand is why would you want to clone an element finder or an element finder "array" in your tests? What use cases does clone() cover?

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I've looked into the protractor source code to find example usages, but found only the underlying change set, which didn't help to have a clear picture.