Guy on Guy Squid Action
I read the article, 'Squid Males "Bisexual"—Evolved Shot-in-the-Dark Mating Strategy' and thought it was the coolest/funniest thing. Especially because I have read a couple of things lately that offer a debate about whether or not bisexuality is real. I guess it's a good possibility.
According to this article, there is a small group of squid (the Octopoteuthis deletron species to be exact) that live in the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean who don't really care what sex they mate with. They tend to just swim up to the first of their kind they can find, stick a sack of sperm on it, and keep on swimming. This isn't because some squid like one gender over the other, it's because in water that deep it isn't easy for them to tell whether the squid they just encountered is male or female. The only thing that really differentiates the two is that females have a patch of wrinkled skin, which isn’t a lot to go by in water that deep. Hendrik Hoving of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California led this study. Him and his colleagues recorded squid from 1,300 to 2,600 thousand feet deep in the water through robotic submarines. They observed more than 100 squid and saw that just about the same amount of males as females were carrying sperm packets on their bodies. In the words of the researchers, this shows "that males slap a sperm packet on just about anything with eight arms."
This action puts this certain species of squid near the top of a very short list of animals that show same-sex mating behavior. The list includes some primates and dolphins, but nothing to this degree.
After reading this article, I realized that squid bisexuality isn't the same as human bisexuality. Although, it does show that, in the end, survival and reproduction is really the only thing that matters in the wild, no matter what jokes result.
