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.
(.)(.)
How do they know it wasn’t gay squid sex?
(Hey, thank me later for the google search boost….)
Makes the boobies seem rather tame, donit?
Hey, speak for yourself. I look pretty damn cool during sex. ;)
Giant Squid Breakdown
I read this as two feeding testicles. It gave me some strange ideas :-S
Oh, is this at the natural history museum? That place is great! One of the highlights of my trip to Paris a number of years ago.
OT. Is there an explanation for the recurrence of posts like #1 now and again? Just curious.
afterthought, wÒÓ† communicates through boobies. Theories abound as to why, but we figured it was a programming mistake. You see, when wÒÓ† was commissioned, the blueprints called for it to communicate, like R2D2, through ‘boopies’.
I think that if you’re inserting sperm packets into your own body, that counts as uncoordinated. Passion be damned.
That’s not uncoordinated, that’s onanism. I guess those squid are goin’ straight to squid hell. I wonder if squid hell involves breading?…
I had a similar thought to Greg Laden – have they actually done genetic tests to confirm that the sperm is from that squid, and not an accidental injection from another male?
I see tomorrows astronomy picture of the day will be Dancing Squids. A day late but what the hell…
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/
PZ, PZ, PZ, i’m sorry to say you’re wrong. Architeuthis does indeed have a penis and not a hectocotylus. On a side note it’s also not unknown for males, or indeed females to end up biting off (and apparently in some cases eating) their own arms during rumpy pumpy. Now that’s what i call passionate. Also messy.
I like wOOt’s messages: they often act as a stop/think while reading through long threads full of argumentative and excited writings. It’s always worth clicking to see the wOOt image.
#14 is right
http://www.tonmo.com/science/public/architeuthisreproduction.php
Nesis (1987) describes and sketches hectocotlus in male Architeuthis, but Steve O’Shea has not observed this in dissecting many of these animals (although many arm tips are damaged in trawl-caught specimens)… if it does exist, it’s probably vestigial, since the penis has the mechanism to inject the sperm packets into the female so it must extend to where it can touch the female (although it could perhaps be guided by the hectocotylus if one exists.)
Of course, no one has ever seen mating Architeuthis, so no one really knows the details for certain. Also, this is pretty weird for cephalopods, most of them use a hectocotylus to gently place the spermatophore into the female’s mantle, but in the case of Architeuthis, I’m afraid you do deserve a slap with a large tentacle for this gaff, PZ.
Of course, what PZ failed to mention was that 3 days after being hung up the squid came back to life and absolved us of all our sins. (Thanks Squid.)
Shit, I thought there would be more comments for this posting. How raunchy indeed.
Oh, come on! Squid sperm packets are so last year!
“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.”
Squids have legs?
“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, ”
best comment…
“I can attest to that…”
Squid hell?
Does it have lots of sperm whales?
Or is that sperm whale heaven?