Sexual reproduction made easy
Last night I was watching David Attenborough’s “Blue Planet” on BBC Prime. This is one of the greatest nature shows ever made, and as the name would imply it focuses on marine life. Sometimes it jumps around the globe and the animal kingdom, from herring in the Baltic to salmon in British Columbia to penguins etc, all filmed in eye-popping, mind-boggling ways. Last night the episode was focused firmly on “the abyss,” discussing the life found in the deep oceans, including but not limited to the truly weird and mostly icky new animals they’re still discovering around thermal vents and methane seeps and so forth. A lot of the show stressed the bizarre and challenging reproductive strategies some of these animals employ at 4,000 meters down. Like most sexual encounters the world over, the atmosphere is cold and dark and there’s a lot of pressure. Still, some of the sequences, like sea urchins getting it on, were making me sort of hot. Then Sir David began talking about a certain species of deep-sea angler fish that deals with the problem of scarcity of sexual partners in this way: when a male and female finally find each other in all this dangerous dark vastness, the male uses special teeth to attach his tiny self (he is only one-tenth the size of the female) to her underside. Over the course of a week or two they grow permanently together, so that her blood nourishes him. In return, Sir David intoned in his special serious deep-sea voice, “she is assured an endless supply of sperm.”
Magda was listening to this with half an ear, and I ran it past her as a baby-making strategy. “We should try it,” she said. “But I’m not sure how we’ll get you to one-tenth of my size.”
So that’s what we’re working on this week.
