Valentine's Day
Here's a touching St Valentine's Day story. It's about how love--at least the invertebrate version thereof--can find a way to surmount distance and odds in the cold uncaring sea.
Here's the story that I found on Science Daily. The news item is excerpted from the University of Alberta research story that can be found here.
Compelled to mate, yet firmly attached to the rock, barnacles have evolved the longest penis of any animal for their size - up to 8 times their body length - so they can find and fertilize distant neighbours.
Graduate student Christopher Neufeld and Dr. Richard Palmer from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta have shown that barnacles appear to have acquired the capacity to change the size and shape of their penises to closely match local wave conditions.
The research, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that when wave action is light, a longer (thinner) penis can reach more mates, but at times of higher wave action, a shorter (stouter) penis is more manoeuvrable in flow and therefore can reach more mates.
Now isn't that inspiring? Imagine, 8 times! That would be 48 feet long for me. Yikes!
And think of it from another angle. When somebody is romantically clingy and you don't want anything to do with that person, you describe them as a "barnacle." Now imagine that romantic undesirable with a dong that long! Talk about scary!!
PS I just noticed, 12 hours after posting, that I misspelled "barnacle" in my graphic up above. Oops.
Here's the story that I found on Science Daily. The news item is excerpted from the University of Alberta research story that can be found here.
Compelled to mate, yet firmly attached to the rock, barnacles have evolved the longest penis of any animal for their size - up to 8 times their body length - so they can find and fertilize distant neighbours.
Graduate student Christopher Neufeld and Dr. Richard Palmer from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta have shown that barnacles appear to have acquired the capacity to change the size and shape of their penises to closely match local wave conditions.
The research, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that when wave action is light, a longer (thinner) penis can reach more mates, but at times of higher wave action, a shorter (stouter) penis is more manoeuvrable in flow and therefore can reach more mates.
Now isn't that inspiring? Imagine, 8 times! That would be 48 feet long for me. Yikes!
And think of it from another angle. When somebody is romantically clingy and you don't want anything to do with that person, you describe them as a "barnacle." Now imagine that romantic undesirable with a dong that long! Talk about scary!!
PS I just noticed, 12 hours after posting, that I misspelled "barnacle" in my graphic up above. Oops.
Comments
Sassy, the problem is that the mass doesn't change so that length comes at the sacrifice of width. Girls would just giggle and that's no fun!
K, I don't know what you mean and I suspect that's a good thing!
Have a great weekend!
Michele sent me today. :)
~S
here from michele