Now you can learn everything you need to know about octopus sex. It's a bit tangly:
But just in case you got lost in all the tentacles, here's a diagram to help you out. By the way, in case you've ever wondered where an octopus keeps its nads, they're maybe not where you expected.
There should be a warning sign here, though.
In one instance, she and her colleagues observed two day octopuses mating on a reef in Indonesia. After about 15 minutes of copulation, the female lunged and wrapped two arms around the male's bulbous body, his mantle. A few minutes later, the male was motionless. The female then carried the corpse to her den, where he presumably became dinner.
In another instance, researchers watched a large female day octopus off the coast of Micronesia. A small male mated with her a dozen times. But then the male went in for a 13th mating session, and the female turned on him. She strangled him and took him back to her den to feed on over the course of the next two days.
So octopuses are all feminists, then?
- Log in to post comments
PZ, if you will forgive for posting a comment in an entirely unrelated topic, would you watch this? The channel is called Christians Against Dinosaurs. I wish I were making this up. These guys manage to outdo AiG - somehow.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYxIsFJNY06h7K7XxK1zDEA
I think this is hysterical. I plan to forward it to my creationist relatives.
The dino thing, not the octopus thing. I am sending the octopus thing to my feminist relatives.
As with pretty much anything this insane, I can't say for sure if it is serious or not. I find it morbidly entertaining, nonetheless.
This female behavior is one more strong evidence that our theoretical model for LUCA - the Last Universal Common Ancestor for all biological systems - is thru. Look how the shape of octopus is equal the shape of our galaxy which is the same shape of LUCA. LUCA was hermaphrodite, the female function is the central nuclear black hole and the male function is the pulsar. Everytime that the pulsar "ejaculates" its nuclear magma towards the black hole, the pulsar disappears, becoming a supernova. The male bee is who best mimics the scene we see in the sky, flying six meters above the soil, mating with the queen and falling dead. Why the mating in the sky? The behaviors of octopus, bees, ants, is merely the expression of the laws ruling the atoms that composes their bodies.