This is a beautiful illustration of the flaw in applying human sexual conventions to non-human organisms. researchers studying deep-sea squid found that all of the squid, male and female alike, were speckled with sperm packets — the males just flick these things out at any passing squid, on the chance that it’s a female. It’s silly to call this bisexuality or same-sex mating, though — it’s pretty darned common in invertebrates. Many species of sea urchins, for instance, indulge in synchronized ejaculatory orgies: on one or a few days a year, all of the individuals in a colony simultaneously spew eggs and sperm into the water, to the degree that they can turn the ocean milky white with semen and ova. Do we call that homosexuality? Is it even right to refer to it as an “orgy”? It’s just indiscriminate fertilization.
The authors of the paper, at least, get it exactly right.
In the Royal Society paper the team writes: “In the deep, dark habitat where O. deletron lives, potential mates are few and far between.
“We suggest that same-sex mating behaviour by O. deletron is part of a reproductive strategy that maximises success by inducing males to indiscriminately and swiftly inseminate every [squid] that they encounter.”
It’s every boy’s dream, just hosing everything down with semen, just to be sure.
(Also on Sb)
That’s quite the vivid image with which to leave your readers, lol.
I do love imagining how it would work in sapiens-space:
“Hey, Mark, how’s it going a– what the HELL, man?”
“Sorry. I was sort of waiting for some OTHER girls to happen by.”
“Great. You get to stand around spraying the air with man-sauce, I get to go home and tell my parents I’m a teen pregnancy statistic. You’re a dick.”
As a great man once said, stop putting images in my head that I can’t get out later except with a bullet.
I’d call this Jack Harkness.
The japanese have had sex with so many squids that they all learned how to bukkake just everything.
Yup, sounds like a college frat party to me…
required @ 5;
That was a little uncalled for, don’t you think? Lets keep ethnicity out of this.
Weird that when the study isn’t on humans, you don’t flip out at the conclusions they draw.
“We suggest that same-sex mating behaviour by O. deletron is part of a reproductive strategy that maximises success by inducing males to indiscriminately and swiftly inseminate every [squid] that they encounter.”
Did they actually compare the reproductive success of males that flick sperm at any approaching squid versus males that didn’t? Maybe the “didn’t” squid don’t exist, making it an impossible/difficult test, but you wouldn’t let evolutionary psychologists get away with that excuse!
Of course, I’m too lazy to look at the original journal article. If they did, in fact, test that then I take back my snark!
“No, no, no — this is not bisexuality or homosexuality.”
Correct. It’s bukkake.
Fits the banner nicely, then – it’s all about the random biological ejaculations from a bunch of godless, er, squid :)
(OK, fine, not strictly speaking random if they’re discerning as to whether or not there’s another squid in the vicinity)
“hosing”
Urk. Hosing-boy seen lifting luggage for another venomous anti-gay rhetoritician.
O Deletron, O Deletron, thy sperm packets so sticky.
O Deletron, O Deletron, thy sperm they are so sniny.
OK, I just like deletron, as if it were the particle of deletion. Spam alert, Deletron to thread five please.
“Don’t Ask,
Don’t TellJust Impregnate”?Yeah, but a gay squid would be an awesome for making a Rabbi uncomfortable.
I remember a Monty Python skit where the narrator of a nature “show” tries to make the subject of mollusks more interesting to the viewers by talking about the sex lives of different animals. It ends with the viewers stomping on a limpid for being a pervert.
Unfortunately there’s someone out there who, if they read this, would try and hunt this species to extinction for this same reason.
*awesome, not ‘an awesome’. Shouldn’t a shiny new site have comment editing?
Like this?
(Rammstein – “Bück dich”; hosing starts around 3:30, NSFW).
I think it’s reasonable to draw some kind of distinction between “sex” and “mating” to distinguish between discriminate and indiscriminate fertilization.
If you are simply fertilizing indiscriminately, the terms “heterosexual”, “homosexual” and “bisexual” don’t really apply since they imply a choice in partner.
You are simply mating.
The closest Zoidberg animated gif I could find: spraying the ship.
On a much less exotic level, you can poke around your own yards in much of North America and stumble onto a garter snake “mating ball.”
Dozens of little snakes, about a foot long, literally wrap themselves up into a squirming ball. I presume the males are depositing semen on everybody in the party.
Actually, it sounds like a pretty efficient way of perpetuating the species without a lot of fighting or pursuit.
Judging from some of the idiot spawn my wife teaches, we humans might do well to adopt a similar strategy. Oh yeah, I forgot, in my wife’s school’s neighborhood, that’s pretty much how they’re already doing it.
“Hosing”? Pfft. Intromissionist.
(also on SB)
Would we then have to say the same thing about wind pollination amongst flowering plants?
Are Oak, Hickory, Cottonwood trees participating in bisexuality or orgies if their male gametes blanket the stamens of other plants?
What about the pollen that covers my car? Is this some sort of motor-fetish?
Not really, not if other cephalopod species don’t generally engage in same-sex mating. You should have some sort of term for it, although if it’s simply because they don’t recognize the sexes you might want a different term than one uses for species that do recognize the sexes.
Directing sperm packets at other squid isn’t too similar to the external fertilization practiced by sea urchins, either.
Glen Davidson
Yeah, plants.
Some of them don’t even stay within their own species.
Which reminds me- yesterday, one of my students was wearing this shirt:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/womens/d3af/
It made me think of you.
Yeah… if this is can be called bisexual or homosexual behavior, then we can say that trees are masturbating.
It’s hard to call reproduction-related activity “sex” when it’s in an animal whose experience is so far removed from our own. Terms like heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality may be relevant in humans (though this whole understanding of sexuality is culturally-specific to some extent) because sexual behavior is encompasses both reproductive and social (pair- and group-bonding, etc.) functions. These squid seem to have taken a different evolutionary path with regards to sex — so different as to need a different vocabulary for description. (Of course, I could be wrong — maybe all this flicking of sperm packets has a social function for these squid. Still a bit different from human sex…)
One statement I have to agree with, though:
#27
An FPS, right?
@28 More like a shoot ’em up.
Imagine what the people who think that video games cause violent behaviour would do…
This reminds me of why W C Fields didn’t drink water.
So the eventual takeover by the Elder Gods will go something like this?
“I welcome our noodly overlor…AAAAAAAH! AH! What the hell is This! AAAAH!”
(Is told what “this” is.)
“AAAAAAAAAH! GET ME AN UMBRELLA! STOOP! STOP IT! STOOOOOOOOOOP! Hey, somebody’s gotta clean all this up you know!”
@#32
Don’t worry- it’s just alfredo sauce.
I kind of like the mental image and/or thought of all those innocent trees and plants actually furiously masturbating or engaged in some sort of grand environment-wide orgy, I think we should run with this.
Hey, if we can call the O. deletron’s organ a “penis,” then we can call their sexual activities bisexual.
Many species of sea urchins, for instance, indulge in synchronized ejaculatory orgies: on one or a few days a year
Dear Penthouse Forum – I am writing to you as well as the Journal of Marine Biology to tell you what happened to me last summer…
I love how the ads for this blog entry are mostly for dating sites or “mail-order girlfriend” sites.
@34:
One allergy sufferer began one of her blog posts with “What a miserable time of year this is, with the trees having sex in our noses…”
Does not compute.
Limpet.
Bingo. And so are sea urchins and corals.
How about the pair of male Mallards that lives in my neighborhood? They are obviously bonded mates. I wrote about them on a thread here several months back, but just this morning I posted a photo and a short essay about them on my blog. (“Getting Along Swimmingly”) (Also this morning, I posted an essay about my rejection of “tolerance” — in that post I refer to reading and thinking about my own latent bigotry in an effort to overcome it; much of that reading and thinking took place here. So thanks for this place, which is good for that sort of thing.)
—–
(Warning: In a post from a few days ago, there is a recipe for split pea soup. Photos. You have been warned.)
Well, their culture DID invent tentacle porn and bukkake. It’s a fair cop.
Required @5: I’m not terribly sure who in your comment is supposed to have learnt from whom.
A lot of fish do this, too. I think herring are a prime example. It’s a “glut the opposition” strategy. They all release their eggs and milt at the same time. The gametes have the best chance of finding each other and the lurking scavengers can’t eat everything because their stomachs will hold only so much. They may get 90% of the products of mating, but they won’t get it all… until humans come along to skim off the “excess.” That’s what’s happening to horseshoe crabs. Migrating birds feed on the eggs but there are always some left over–so humans are scooping up what’s left, as well as catching spawning adults to cut up for bait.
Quodlibet, are you sure these are bonded mates or could they be siblings who haven’t separated yet? In the late summer, I often see groups of young birds together. (I realize it will be hard to catch them doing their head-bobbing ritual.)