Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Last weekend, I met a young woman who asked me to sign a picture of a friend’s tattoo (not the real tattoo, unfortunately!), and it’s so pretty I said I’d have to include it on the Friday Cephalopod. Here it is:
(Eat your heart out, Carl!)
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.
Ooooh, it’s a simple recipe and accompanying video for cooking octopus. I want to do this. My wife and daughter would see that video with rising horror, and are probably greatly relieved that they’ve got me quarantined in the frozen midwest, far from any coast where I might actually come home some evening with a large mollusc and a hungry glitter in my eye.
OK, I say uncle. Everyone’s been sending me the story of the hexapus, the six-armed octopus found in England. Sure, he’s cute…
…but I’m afraid it’s not that big a deal. It’s an ordinary sort of error — we know that cephalopod limbs develop from primordia that exhibit a pattern of fusion as it is, so an epigenetic error that causes either an excess of fusions or failure of arm buds to form isn’t a particularly dramatic event. Now, if they breed this octopus and find a heritable propensity for limb development failur, then I’ll be much more interested, since that means we’d be able to look at the mechanisms.
Now I have to get back to grading genetics exams…
