Conjuring with rainbow names and handfuls of sea-spray

Mnemiopsis leidyi

Chapter 22: Venus's Girdle

page 316: [Cteonophore] lineage is uncertain. A major for reason for this is that their DNA appears to be evolving extremely fast.

page 316 (marginal note): bioluminescent glow. A readable introduction to remarkable  bioluminescent creatures in the ocean here.  Another good resource here.

page 319: animal pleasure is not something from which the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has shied away. In the case of bonobos “the novelty and innovation never seems to end”:

“Observations...indicate that there [is] no tendency toward ‘normalization’ of position or time of copulation.” Savage-Rumbaugh also chronicles the various sounds that the bonobos make while having sex. Chimps make one sound. The bonobos have a variety of cries (naturally), including one known as the “long modulated squeal.” With as much sobriety as Savage-Rumbaugh can muster, she writes, “It changes pitch and phonetic aspect at least once, sometimes twice, and is rather poorly represented as ‘we ee e.’ ”

This is the twenty-third in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

Dragonfly Kama Sutra

Grasping the female’s head in his mating pincers, the male first must transfer his sperm from a storage site on his lower abdomen to a copulatory organ inconveniently located on his upper abdomen. Then he must induce his headlocked mate to curl her genitals up toward that loaded midbelly penis, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s already mated and the male must pause to expand a little bristled lobe to scrape out the previous suitor’s sperm. 

-- from Nature's drone, pretty and deadly Natalie Angier

Petseleh, Shlang etc.

Modern penises come with all kinds of frills and accoutrements, like bristles, barbs, foreskins and multiple heads (some marsupials have forked penises; the echidna's penis has four heads). Some penises engorge themselves with blood or lymph fluid; others rely on a mineral bone to get a boner (in fact, humans are one of the only primates without a penis bone). When erect, penises might be rather stiff and inflexible, or—as in the case of whales and dolphins—retain a rubbery agility. Some penises are unexpectedly small for an animal's overall size, such as the gorilla's typical nubbin (1.25 inches erect on average). Others are astoundingly large: the humble barnacle claims the longest penis relative to body size of any animal. A sedentary creature, the barnacle probes for a mate with its impressive penis, which can be eight times its own length.

-- Ferris Jabr

Xenotropia

A Tibetan mystic saying goes: We are here to realize the illusion of our separateness. The spiritual sentiment has a biological cognate. Our xenotropic drive — to merge with what is not us, temporarily in sex, or permanently in symbiosis or cross-species hybrids — is more than a metaphor. But it also offers spiritual solace. When we hook up with another, in sex or love (or, more rarely, both) we prove that our isolation is not permanent. In the fullness of time, we may all be linked...

-- from Death and Sex by (Tyler Volk and) Dorion Sagan quoted by Maria Popova

Venus´s girdle

Thirty-first in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 22: Venus's Girdle

page 316: a translucent ribbon. A fuller description here.

page 319: As far as we can tell, most [animals] enjoy sex. We now know more that we did about the wild thing between dinosaurs. But what must it be like for echidnas, where the penis of the male has one shaft and four heads? In banana slugs, the penis emerging from the head of each of the hermaphrodites is as long as its body. Then there is the astonishing coupling of leopard slugs.

Intercourse across species boundaries can have unfortunate consequences. Alan Root tells of a crowned crane that fell in love with a standpipe. Here is a thoughtful piece about social attitudes and the law where people are involved.

Octogasm

via Deep Sea News

A better soundtrack, in my view, would have been Chopin's Etude op 10 no 1 in C Major

'Libertine bubbles'

Ain't nobody here but us Scyllarides latus larvae

Stranger and more plausible than the theory (attributed to Aristophanes in the Symposium) that sex has its origins in people chasing around trying to find the other half from which they were once severed is the libertine bubble theory of Thierry Lodé, which argues that rather than providing reproductive advantages:

it might be better to see sex as a genetic exchange between two organisms, as originating from an archaic horizontal gene transfer process among the prebiotic bubbles on the ocean surface, which are thought to have played a major role in the creation of living cells. My theory suggests sex results from three key primitive conditions: first, bubbles form spontaneously, creating a favourable environment for genetic material; second, the "promiscuous" nature of these bubbles allows transfer of genetic material among the most "libertine" of the bubbles, gradually leading to a certain membrane selectivity; and third, DNA overcrowding encourages primitive meiotic recombination.

Up close and personal

The Center for Biological Diversity uses humour to make a serious point about human overpopulation and conservation. From an action alert:

Be a part of the Center for Biological Diversity’s brand-new Endangered Species Condom Project, a campaign to nationally distribute free condoms in six different packages featuring endangered species threatened by human overpopulation, with the goal of raising awareness about overpopulation’s serious impacts on our planet. The packages will be released next month, and we need your help to get them out. Sign up below and you can help us educate people across the [United States] about what overpopulation does to species that don’t have the privilege of over-reproducing — or even reproducing enough to survive — from the spotted owl to the Puerto Rico rock frog to the polar bear.

48-eyed tentacle love

Cubozoa, or box jellyfish, such as these two Copula sivickisi, are the only jellyfish that copulate. They are also unique in having eight camera type eyes, eight slit-shaped eyes and eight lensless pit eyes, all feeding into a simple nervous circuit without a brain. They are active swimmers and engage in eloborate courting rituals.

Dance

Manakins spend 80% of their daylight hours dancing.

-- Nicky Clayton

(added 11 Nov:) and at least one species makes music with its wings.

Tristan, Isolde and mitochondria

Sex is most advantageous when there's a lot of variation in a population, when mutation rates are high and selection pressures are great.

That combination is a killer for clones. They are particularly vulnerable to high mutation rates, which undermine genetic vigour. Heavy selection puts a premium on the genes that work, and means beneficial mutations are more likely to be selected at the expense of diversity. And diverse populations have the most to lose whenever there's a selective sweep for a particular gene in this way.

The first eukaryotic cells faced all three problems in spades. As a result of the early gene bombardment from mitochondria, the mutation rate surely shot through the roof. Selection pressures must have been heavy, too, with parasitic introns proliferating throughout the genome. And with such rapid genome evolution, the population could be nothing but diverse.

Sex was the only answer. Total sex. Recombination of genes across all chromosomes. The big question now is not so much why sex evolved - but how.

-- Nick Lane, reflecting on work by Sally Otto and others.

Each of Nature's works has an essence of its own; each of her phenomena a special characterisation: and yet their diversity is in unity.

-- Goethe

Epitoky, and other epics

My Genitals Just Grew Eyes and Swam Away must be one of the more attention-grabbing titles in recent days, and the post to which it's attached is probably worth it.

Featuring polychaetes worms of the family Syllidae, it appeared on Catalogue of Organisms, linking to Sex Week on Deep Sea News.

Today Catalogue looks back over its most popular posts of the last two years, and here you can find marine sloths, deep sea eels, candidates for Most Unbelievable Organisms Evah! and much else.

A giant underwater orgy followed by immediate death

Miriam Goldstein on the six secrets of squid sex.

The extinction of animals, undertaken by the colourist Walton Ford

According to the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, "a tale of conquest and colonization and accumulated injuries against nature...is at the heart of Walton Ford’s allegories". For Bill Bufford, Walton Ford is Bruegel by way of Borges.


Tur (an Aurochs), purchased by the Smithsonian.


Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros

In Man and Beast Calvin Tomkins reports:

At first glance, the long procession of great auks in "Funk Island" winds, lemming-like over a rocky landscape, toward the distant fires and cauldrons that signal their extinction as a species. Clear enough, but what is going on in that huge cloud of smoke from the fires? Close examination reveals dozens of naked men and women in erotic combinations. Ford's research had disclosed that the flightless auks were clubbed to death, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so that their plumage could be used in feather beds and pillows. "This was the global economy in action, right?", he said. "It was like goddam Auschwitz for birds, so the Marquis de Sade and Casanova could do their fucking on feather beds!"...

[A new painting of] mountain lions was nearly done when I visited his studio in mid November. Lately, he explained, there had been numerous sightings of these big cats in the Berkshires, "although not one sighting is documented, and there's no evidence -- no scat, no tree scratchings, not attacks on pets or joggers. Mountain lions have been extinct in New England for decades." Ford's painting is set in a local cemetery, where several pairs of mountain lions are copulating among gravestones. "they're making more ghost cats for people to see", he said. His are life-size, and very lifelike.

I'd like to suggest an animal for inclusion in a future painting: the Northern elephant seal. Perhaps Ford has already done this or considered it only to reject it, and if so the more fool me. Still, in support of my case here's an anecdote which I may have imagined but think I heard at Año Nuevo SNR:

The elephant seal was hunted to the brink of extinction in the nineteenth century. As we now know, a few survived, but by the late nineteenth century it was believed the species was actually extinct.  Then a research party (from the Smithsonian, no less) stumbled on small group of survivors [on Guadalupe Island off Baja?]. They slaughtered them all for study, stuffing and mounting even though for all they knew these might be the last ones in the world. 

That's how I remember the story, but I am happy to be corrected. With or without the anecdote, elephant seals are the tops.


An archive of press articles about Walton Ford is here.

P.S. More striking pictures, this time of Southern elephant seals, here (hat tip Hypnogogic Zoo).

From the shallows

Zooillogix is finally living up to the 'x' in our namesake. We have discovered a microscopic animal that engages in lesbian sex with its dead female friends in order to obtain DNA and thus survive to reproduce.

Zx. has humourously repackaged for Xmas a paper by Gladyshev et al. that actually dates from May 08, and was reported at the time. Calling what is involved 'sex' is a real stretch. Anyway, the findings do seem to shed light on the apparent conundrum that bdelloid rotifers have survived more than 80 million years without sex.

Let's do it

...and then there are the flatworms (P.S. 25 Nov: not to mention Rachel Johnson for the worst animal metaphors)