Atomic Nerds

Sex AND violence… you can just tell I’m milking the lowest common denominator for material, given as I’m at a bit of a loss today.

In my sporadic attempt to keep you all current with just how glad you should be to be a hominid when it comes to mating systems, I bring you an interesting example of a mating behavior found in some hemaphroditic invertebrates, courtesy of Deep Sea News: penis fencing.

The long and the short (*pause for snickering*) of it is, each worm has a double-headed dagger of an inseminator, and each is trying to inseminate the other- like I said, they’re hermaphrodites- without, we assume, getting inseminated themselves. (The actual method of insemination is… indiscriminate and mildly traumatic.) As the blogger at I’m-a-Chordata points out, it’s hard for humans to watch this behavior and not drop a big steaming load of cultural and species baggage all over it; it’s easy to think of the inseminator as the “winner” and the inseminated as the “loser” despite that both worms are successfully reproducing.

On the other hand, it’s also hard to argue that the whole episode is usually dominated by one individual instead of both inseminating each other and flapping off to have their mutual babies, and there’s a reason for that. Most likely, the reason is not that either worm “loses” by taking the female role in the encounter- again, it’s successful reproduction- but rather that either might “win” a little more by playing the exclusively male role*. A flatworm that inseminates but isn’t inseminated has more options- it’s mated successfully, but its much more expensive female gametes aren’t then necessarily committed and it has further options, and can generally reproduce more often while using fewer resources to do it.

*One of the posts in the pipeline that will go up when I have more time and energy is the reason that the male/female sex ratio is the way it is. In other words, more later.

Posted lookey here, Science: we'll fuck you up |