Awww, it’s a romance made in the blogosphere: Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette, my two very favoritest physics bloggers, are getting married. And it involves APS meetings and Fourier transforms, all intensely romantic.
This calls for some romantic imagery.
this isn’t appropriate and don’t you dare publish it but doncha think those damselflies are a tad queer.
The links need touching up. As I read this, they are both pointing to Cosmic Variance. The second should probably be pointing to Cocktail Party Physics
I suspect I don’t want to know all the particulars behind that romantic image. It’s pretty good, but has nothing on the Fourier transform!
Leave it to PZ to find the perfect disturbing romantic image — this is the man who brought us squid porn, after all. :)
Leave it to PZ to find the perfect disturbing romantic image — this is the man who brought us squid porn, after all. :)
The universe may end up being a better place because of love and the Fourier Transform. This story make me smile so damn much that I looked like a little idiot when I read about it. Physics and love are two intertwined pieces of life for me, since I met my hunny while tutoring her in basic physics. Jeebus, but I’m hopeless.
The best of luck to you, Jennifer and Sean!
Disturbing? But it’s a heart-shaped pair of arthropods in love! It’s beautiful!
“a heart-shaped pair of arthropods in love…”
LOL! That’s the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the picture.
Or as the priest said in The Princess Bride, “Twoo wuv……”
I’m just really glad that PZ didn’t put up a picture of mating praying mantises because the groom-to-be will definitely not approve.
Damselflies may not decapitate each other during sex, but their sperm-scrapers and other tools are pretty freaky all the same.
See here and here.
Romantic on the outside, all sexually-selected business on the inside.
Beautiful!
These breed in my London Garden pond.
Along with common newts, frogs, Koi Carp (bottom pond) and sometimes, humungous dragonflies – I found a really scary late-stage instar about three weeks ago.
Gorgeous damselflies!
Markie, if you haven’t watched damselfly sex before (but I thought everyone had!), here’s what’s going on: The male is on the right. He has charged up a copulatory structure (“secondary genitalia”) in his upper abdomen with sperm from his primary genitalia, which are about where you’d expect them to be. The tip of the female’s abdomen is receiving sperm from this secondary structure, while the male holds her behind the head using claspers at the end of his abdomen.
Always glad to see damselflies making more damselflies. For one thing, they eat mosquitoes.
Up here, it’s the the Hellgrimites that will get you.
Hell grim ites. What is that? Some new SoBabtist sect?
I see by googling that it is something used to catch fish but I suspect there are other spellings.