Octopus abaculus
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Check it out: it’s yet another transitional form, a 92 million year old snake with two hindlimbs. Cool! Just last week I was told that none of these things exist.
Look! He’s been plastinated and hung in a Paris museum!
OK, that’s not so bad — if anyone wants to plastinate me after I’m dead and string me up from the rafters, I won’t mind. This next bit, though, is going too far: people are laughing at the giant squid’s embarrassing little sexual accidents. Seriously, everyone looks ridiculous during sex and it’s not unusual to have the occasional slip up … and we bipedal mammals can screw up in even more embarrassing ways. And to add ignorance to insult, the squid article even gets it wrong.
But males get round their inferior size by being endowed with a particularly long penis, which means they can inject the female without having to get too close to her chomping beak. The male’s sexual organ is actually a bit like a high-pressure fire hose and is normally nearly as long as his body – excluding legs and head.
But having such a big penis does have one drawback: it seems that co-ordinating eight legs, two feeding tentacles and a huge penis, whilst fending off an irate female, is a bit too much to ask, and one of the two males stranded on the Spanish coast had accidentally injected himself with sperm packages in the legs and body.
Foolish vertebrates. The squid doesn’t have a penis. One of his ten arms, called the hectocotyl arm, is specially modified to insert sperm packets. Besides, all this really tells us is that squid have much better, much wilder orgies than we do. They aren’t uncoordinated, they’re just passionate.
When Surinam Toads mate, the male fertilizes the eggs and rubs them onto the female’s back, where they adhere…and the female’s skin responds by swelling and enveloping the eggs. Then, a few months later, we get this lovely scene:
You know how people can be going along, minding their own business, and then they see some cute big-eyed puppy and they go “Awwwww,” and their hearts melt, and then it’s all a big sloppy mushfest? I felt that way the other day, as I was meandering down some obscure byways of the developmental biology literature, and discovered the dicyemid mesozoa … an obscure phylum which I vaguely recall hearing about before, but had never seriously examined. After reading a few papers, I have to say that these creatures are much more lovable then mere puppy dogs. Look at this and say “Awwwww!”
O dicyemid mesozoan, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
