Friday Squid Blogging: Sex Life of Deep-Sea Squid
There’s evidence of indiscriminate fertilization in deep-sea squid. They mate with any other squid the encounter, male or female.
This unusual behaviour, they said, may be explained by the fact the squid is boosting its chances of successfully passing on its genes in the challenging environment it lives in.
In the Royal Society paper the team writes: “In the deep, dark habitat where O. deletron lives, potential mates are few and far between.
“We suggest that same-sex mating behaviour by O. deletron is part of a reproductive strategy that maximises success by inducing males to indiscriminately and swiftly inseminate every [squid] that they encounter.”
Basically, they can’t tell males from females in the dark waters, so it just makes sense to mate with everybody.
The press is reporting this as homosexuality or bisexuality, but it’s not. It’s indiscriminate fertilization. PZ Myers explains.
Petréa Mitchell • September 23, 2011 5:01 PM
A NOAA “service assessment” looking at the Joplin tornado (PDF) goes into a lot of detail about the various signals that a tornado was coming (not just official warnings, but also observations of weather, social signals like closed restaurants, and so forth) and how they were interpreted by the residents. The headline finding is that warning sirens, which are supposed to be the primary indicator, have become useless because tornado prediction is so iffy and the threshold for using them is so low. There’s lots more interesting stuff in there, though.