World of Goo

For the past twenty four to thirty six hours I have been immersed in learning about science. Sometimes these free-form research jags come on and for a couple of days I am super-intense about looking up certain subjects. Most recent on my mind have been octopodes, (otherwise known as octopi, or octopods) because I read that their third arms are the ones they used to fertilize with. They call these arms the hectocotylus.

Octopus, it turns out, are interesting beyond their sexual association with the name of my blog. These cephalopods have big brains, too. In fact, a certain kind, the “Mimic Octopus,” orients its body and tentacles, and changes the color and texture of its skin, in order to pretend that its actually a plant or different kind of fish or even a poisonous sea snake. Its not playing, however. The ability to hide from predators in this fashion is life or death for the octopus.

The sifting for nuggets of octopi knowledge lead me towards several documentary channels: BBC and PBS. On the BBC, people talked with British accents about how remarkable it was that an octopus put into an aquarium tank with a shark, killed and ate the shark. PBS was a bit tougher to use in my quest, but overnight I was able to bittorrent an HD episode of Nova called, “Cuttlefish, the Kings of Camouflage.” These little creatures are just like their cousins, squid and octopus, except a little bit weirder.

For example, in the Nova documentary the fact gets mentioned that some cuttlefish in Australia are able to cross-dress their way to procreation. While the big males fight it out by wrestling with their tentacles, the smaller male cuttlefish curl their tentacles up under themselves and pretend to be females. The crossdressing cuttlefish swims right by the aggressive males unnoticed and fertilize the females. The females will mate with many male cuttlefish and will store deposits of different daddies’ sperm up under their arms, then they actually get to choose which packet to fertilize themselves with. Paternity results revealed the fathers were crossdressing cuttlefish 70% of the time!

Maybe thats the best way for me to have kids someday. First I can start cross-dressing, then I will have to use my dress and skirt wearing to fertilize a female? No… the fertilize the female part is a deal breaker. But the dresses and skorts and heels sound fun! (Well, maybe not heels…) Beyond the science, the other big news for me is that a couple of my closest friends, E and C, have moved back to the ‘Bridge! These are the folks who have given me this forum, my blog, the third of my eight tentacles, to spread my seed on the internet, to whom I will always be grateful and for whom I have much love and respect. Welcome back!