The Creepy Sex-Death of the Male Anglerfish

The term 'anglerfish' can be applied to over 300 different kinds of animal, spanning almost twenty species, named for their method of hunting prey with a fleshy lure dangling off its head which can be wriggled in such a way that prey believe it is food. This development of the anglerfish is an ingenious twist of nature; it is not only practical, but has made it somewhat famous in the animal kingdom, not only for its scarily accurate portrayal in Finding Nemo.

The first thing you notice about the anglerfish is that it is fuck ugly. In every species. It is hideous. It has protruding teeth and bulging eyes and some species are covered in spiny hairs and others look like they are already decaying so that they fit in with the scum on the ocean floor. Most of them live at the bottom of the sea where it is so dark that everything is ugly, but the ones that glow have no excuse. The bioluminescence has evolved to attract prey, but it would seem only sensible to avoid something with a face like this...

And that's the female.

Actually, all of the big, scary ones are female. The males are rather more puny and not half as repulsive. They aren't as worried about feeding, so they don't have to be as predatory as the females. They don't need the big teeth, distending jaw, expanding stomach or light-proof gut lining (so they don't get caught having eaten something luminescent). They are a hell of a lot smaller than the females and their eyes and teeth aren't half as daunting. The male Photocorynus spiniceps is only a quarter of an inch long, one of the smallest vertebrate in the animal kingdom; it is near enough half a million times smaller than its female counterpart.

Some of them are even quite cute.

Sort of.

All that matters with the males is their testicles and their primary concern is mating.

They have very sensitive eyes to seek out their mates in the gloom of the ocean. They also have an amazing sense of smell with which they can sniff out the pheromones of females through the water. Once they have sought out a mate, they latch onto her with their sharp little teeth. He bites into her skin and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her side so that they fuse together. Over the next couple of weeks, his whole body is absorbed into her until all that remains of him is a pair of testicles attached to her side.

In response to the to hormones in the female's bloodstream, the testicles release sperm into her system so that she has an available mate whenever she is ready to breed. Many males can latch onto any given female. A female was once discovered with eight pairs of testicles hanging off her.

In most species, if the male does not find a female with which to mate, he dies. In some species, however, the males are able to swim away into a dark and private part of the ocean where they grow massively and turn into a female in place of their missing mate.

It really puts it into perspective how great it is to be a creature that doesn't die just because it can't get laid...

A Failing of Human Evolution; One of Many

Animals generally have cool things that a lot of people wish had stuck around a bit longer in the evolutionary path. Take, for instance, Batman and Spiderman, who may have taken their desire for animal abilities a bit too far. But I would bet that most people would gladly take wings if they were offered them, or gills, or the ability to leap between trees like squirrels and other cool stuff that just feels like it would be nice. We put far too much importance on things like sporting events for it not to be an obvious remnant of the physical prowess necessary for summoning mates in the animal kingdom.

Generally, we can live without these things. We have the intelligence to design transport so we don't need to be as proficient and travelling long distances, for example, and we've invented shoes so we don't need to have the protection animals get from paws. In fact, we have the intelligence to design machines to deal with pretty much everything that our increasingly lazy species can't be bothered to do with our own bodies, so these advantages that animals have over us aren't all that important.

And then this spider comes along and says, "Fuck you, mankind, bet you wish you had THIS..."

This is a giant wood spider called Nephila pilipes and in this species many tiny males compete for the attention of huge females, which can grow to between seven and ten times the size of the males. During copulation, males are known to sever their own genitals in order to plug the female stop other males breeding with their chosen mate. This is common, particularly among insects, and biologists with far too much time on their hands have documented it extensively.

This is a crafty technique - and the girls have caught on.

A team of researchers found that, when many males were converging on one female, the female can produce an amorphous plug to fill her genitals for the period during which she is laying eggs to prevent being impregnated again. The researchers came to the conclusion that this mechanism is a way of preventing "unwanted or excessive copulation".

Essentially, these spiders have developed a way to avoid being raped when they're busy doing other things.

Now, people may not always be busy doing other things, but no one wants to get raped. Even people who fantasise about getting raped, don't really want to be raped. By definition, rape is sex without consent.

Of all the things that evolution has kept in the human body - take, say, the appendix, which has lost all of its function in the evolutionary process aside from one day exploding and killing you from within - why not this one? This seems pretty damn useful, especially considering the closest we, as a species, have come to preventing "unwanted copulation" is this nasty-looking bastard:

The Sale

I had planned to spend my Saturday catching up on some American political history by finishing off my anthology of Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism. I've only got a few hundred pages left to go, out of well over a thousand, and it's pretty gripping stuff. It has led me to believe that if everything was chronicled half as well that we would be living in a more literature and drug-fuelled world (both most certainly improvements, if Thompson's accounts are anything by which to judge).

But I did not do that, because Katie phoned me in the early afternoon and asked if I wanted to go swimming in the outdoor pool in Hitchin. I said that I very much did want to do that. After some frantic Googling of bus timetables between Luton and Hitchin, we went. It was much fun, and something of an adventure, and my ears are still full of chlorine.

On our brief walk between the bus stop and the swimming pool took us through a very rural area on the outskirts of Hitchin. We wandered down a path with a field on one side and some homes on the other side. They were nice houses, large and well-tended with ornate gates leading onto nice front gardens that were fenced off from the outside world. It was pleasant. It made me wonder why my family chose to live in Luton when Hitchin was right around the corner.

Outside one of the houses, stacked alongside the fence, was a row of boxes and shelves full of books and clothes and miscellaneous household items. Sellotaped to the fence were pieces of paper with prices on - not expensive; very little cost more than £1 - and the request that any moneys paid in exchange for goods be placed in the letter box next to the gate. There was no one there to make sure the people did not simply help themselves to the things. 

Admittedly, these were things that their last owners did not want any more and apparently didn't think would earn much on eBay, but it struck me nonetheless that there was a measure of trust offered to passersby that they would not steal the things. I mean, not everyone carries change on them and might not want to bother paying more than the requested 20p. Or maybe just seeing the opportunity to get something for nothing would be too tempting to pass up.

Maybe it's just because I was raised in Luton - a unashamedly unscrupulous place with a few too many shoplifters and petty criminals - but I would not expect people to pay for things that I had left in the street. Even if they were things I didn't want; if I left a box of things to be sold on the pavement outside my house, I'd probably just expect some drunken idiot to either piss or vomit on them and then I would most likely getting trouble for causing such a huge mess.

The fact is that it was nice to see someone - the previous owners of these goods - who actually trusted other people to exchange their change fairly for their unwanted property. It was nice. It was rare. I enjoyed seeing it. It was not a huge thing to be doing and they were most likely just trying to get rid of some things, but it was enough to make me think and make me smile. I spent quite a lot of time rummaging through the things and wondering if I could justify buying any of it. 

I did buy some. 

(not me)

I left with eight or nine books and I put a few quid in the letter box. They were even kind enough to provide a few carrier bags so I could carry them home.

A Rant: Stupid People

Once upon a time, a bit more than thirty years ago, some nerds, who were brilliant at their job and have greatly benefited mankind, began a project called ENQUIRE. They used it to send each other digital messages from different points on the globe so that they could exchange information and the research they were doing into intensely difficult particle physics could come along a bit more quickly. In 1993, it was announced that the internet would be free to use by anyone. Now, less than 20 years later, it is difficult for some people in the modern generation to imagine how people lived without it. It's general lexis has bled into everyday speech. It has had a huge impact on society and, quite frankly, it was unbelievably generous of those first nerds to allow everyone in the world unlimited access to anything they could possibly want for free. Some of the most intelligent people in the world spent decades working and studying to come up with this and they shared it with the world to do with it what we will, which is why shit like this annoys me:

I am all for freedom of speech but, personally, I try not to comment on things that I don't understand so that I do not confuse or mislead people who trust my judgement; clearly these morons don't want to offer people the same courtesy I do.

And now I could rant a bit more about how intellectually frustrated this barefaced bullshit makes me feel and I could hopelessly bemoan the state of humanity, but I think that this does it well enough for me:

The Richard Nixon Effect on FaceBook

I am currently reading an anthology of writings by Hunter S. Thompson, which is essentially a collection of rambling, drug-addled rants about sports, politics and generally the state of the USA throughout the past 50 years. It's very interesting.

Over the past couple of days, I've read his account of Watergate and all of the scandal surrounding President Richard Milhous Nixon's resignation from the White House. Up until now, everything I knew about Richard Nixon can be epitomised by this picture:

It doesn't really matter that I don't know much about him. It might have been pertinent to my life if I was American and wanted to be a politician, but I'm actually neither. But I did find it interesting.

While he was President, Nixon recorded everything that happened in the White House. He had bugs placed in the all the phones and he carried around a tape recorder so that he could make a note of every thought that he had as President of the United States. He had people running around after him making notes to catalogue everything he did. After he resigned, as part the agreement of his pardon for Watergate from his successor Gerald Ford, he was given all the tapes so that he could keep them as a memento of his presidency forever.

Thompson said that Nixon's obsession with recording things made it look like he cared more about having something to put in the history books than actually running America, as if what was important was how he would look afterwards and how he would be remembered rather than actually helping his country. In the account, Thompson often compared him vividly to the Nazis, even going so far as to liken his underlings to Hitler's advisers, so he clearly wasn't perceived well. But he has been remembered, so it would seem that his aim has been achieved.

Thompson described Nixon's behaviour as a form of mental illness. This is coming from someone whose job it was to record everything that happened and who spent much of his career developing a whole new form of journalism based on it. But he nonetheless categorised the voluntary recording of one's own life as a form of madness. The way he wrote it, I could not help but agree. It seemed so strange that someone would do that - would record every second of their waking moment to ensure that they would be remembered exactly as they wanted to be perceived by other people.

But then I realised that it's practically the norm to do that now. No one does anything without worrying about what they'll tweet about it or how the photos will look on FaceBook. The TimeLine feature on FaceBook means that people can scroll back through their lives and edit out the things they don't want other people to see. It's exactly what Nixon did, exactly what made Thompson - who is, quite frankly, brilliant considering how well he can write when blitzed - predict that Nixon would spend the rest of his life listening to those tapes and reliving his presidency over and over again. Now, pretty much everyone automatically uploads and updates and makes sure that everyone else know what is going on at any given time.

It's scary to think that we'll all end up like Richard Nixon.

Then again, who wouldn't want to run the world and have an awesome body despite being nothing more than a head in a jar?

Yes, I realise the irony of blogging about this.

What I Did Last Night

Last night was a Friday and, as I have next to no life, I was indoors and bored. I could have been out doing normal teenager-y things, but it was raining and I prefer being comfortable to being sociable. Therefore, I spent my Friday night listening to The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing and cleaning out the drawers in my bedroom, which have spent the past four years or so accumulating miscellaneous junk. Except the bottom one. The bottom one is broken and doesn't open, so remains unmolested.

Here is The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing.

Here is a list of things I found in my drawers, in no particular order because I cannot be bothered to alphabetise (for once) and I forget the order in which the things were found:

• 4 pairs of ordinary 3D glasses
• 1 pair of Harry Potter 3D glasses
• 1 pair of Shrek 3D glasses
• My retainer
• A tasselly waistcoat - I still haven't decided whether or not I think it's hideous...
• All the plans for the James Bond parody series Monty Bond I wrote with Elliot in Year 9
• The Geography assignment that got me a level 7 in Year 9
• Thousands of keyrings, including many in the shape of sperm
• The original drawings of Wild Whizz, Wild Ted and Wild Tizzwed
• The guitar tab for 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer'
• A tangled mass of Scooby Strings (if you don't know what these are, then you had no childhood)
• My Blue Peter badge
• Numerous other badges, many Pirates Of The Caribbean
• 5 watches that have stopped working
• 1 watch that still works
• The first three acts of a musical I started but never finished writing when I was about 13 entitled The Adventures of Captain Retard, complete with lyrics for three songs and the guitar riff for one. I kept this. It was hilarious. Terrible, but hilarious.
• A pristine edition of Top Gear Magazine from at least 3 years ago
• A list of supremely shit Things To Do Before I Die, which have since been heavily revised
• A number of Poundland bags-for-life
• A rusty bracelet I found on the beach about six years ago
• The provisional drivers' licence I had to have replaced because I couldn't find it in time for my theory test. Oops.
• A brass engraving of Charles Dickens
• Many notebooks filled with shit drawings and random facts
• A 'Bloke Bingo' scorecard
• Some nail varnish that was so old that it had dust on the inside
• Smudgy photographs of me and Beca from the photo booth in the Namco Station at the Galaxy

Draw whatever conclusions you will from this information. Personally, I am struggling to understand how I made it out of childhood so normal... Still, got a good list out of it. And who doesn't love lists?

So I was going to rant about 50 Shades...

... but this pretty much sums up everything I would've said.

I mean, mine would've been more sweary, probably, and far longer, but wouldn't have said any more, really. You would've come away with the same impression.

If you are going to do some Googling for better erotica, might I suggest the lovely Leone Ross.