Birds do it.
Bees do it.
Hermaphroditic flatworms do it.
To their own face!
Hey there sexy, Julian here for DNews and
today we’re gonna do it like they do on
the Discovery channel, which it turns out
can be super weird sometimes.
A recent observation of flatworm insemination
got our curiosity aroused, so to speak, about
strange animal sex.
The worm in question, Macrostomum hystrix,
has a needley penis.
Usually it would use its needley penis to
wound another flatworm and inseminate it.
But when there’s not a lot of stabbing/loving
victims around, the worm will stab itself.
In the head.
To get pregnant.
It’s like I always say, “Love yourself,
even if you’re f*cked in the head.”
You see most flatworms are hermaphroditic,
meaning they have male and female sex organs.
Some large aquatic species of flatworm actually
mate with a behavior called penis fencing.
It’s exactly what it sounds like.
Winner gets laid and the loser gets stabbed
and pregnant.
One such species is, and I’m not making
this up, the Pseudobiceros hancockanus.
It’s probably pronounced hancockanus but
I think marine biologists just have dirty
minds.
Hermaphrodites are more common than you might
think.
Like clownfish.
Yes, those clownfish.
But instead of having male and female sex
organs simultaneously like the flatworms,
they’re what’s called sequential hermaphrodites.
Clownfish first develop into males, but will
change over their lifetime as they move up
the social hierarchy.
Female clownfish are the largest and most
aggressive in the colony, but if she is removed
then the most dominant male will change his
sex and take her place.
So if Finding Nemo were scientifically accurate,
Marlin would have become a she and Nemo would
have mated with her.
Did…
Did I just ruin finding nemo for everyone?
Sequential hermaphrodites don’t always go
from male to female.
75% of hermaphroditic fish actually go the
other way, like parrotfish, angelfish, groupers,
and some sea stars.
One such sea star is Nepanthia belcheri, and
it’s a special one.
It’s a sequential hermaphrodite, and can
make babies when males and females release
sperm and eggs into the environment and hope
they find each other.
That’s actually how most sea stars mate.
Gross, Patrick.
But Nepanthia belcheri and some other species
can reproduce asexually.
It doesn’t help their genetic diversity,
but boy does it make them hard to kill.
These sea stars can make entirely new sea
stars by splitting in half and regenerating
until they’re whole again.
Other species will shed arms that are autonomous,
even though they’re severed from the nervous
system and the hydraulic system.
They’re just like a zombie’s severed hand,
if the hand could then regrow an entire zombie
after several months.
Sea stars like this can be problematic, and
there’s no better example than the Crown-of-Thorns
sea star.
This nasty guy eats the great barrier reef
around Australia, and it’s venomous, because
of course it is, it’s Australian.
It’s going to town on the reef and Australians
have to cull their numbers to save the reef.
Originally they tried killing them by cutting
them up.
If you cut them into thirds, they die.
But if you cut them in half, 75% of the time
you get two new venomous 20-armed environment
destroying monsters.
Curse you, asexual reproduction!
If asexual reproduction is so great, why do
we have sex?
Aside from it being fun.
Trace has the explainer here.
Do you know of any other weird animal sex
stories you want us to disseminate on the
internet?
Let us know in the comments or on facebook
or twitter, subscribe for more, and I’ll
see you next time on DNews.
