Why would this BAFFLE scientists???

[mrlynn]

I sent this article to my entomologist daughter, who responds:

I think it's a very interesting article. It's a very cool system, and it makes a great "wow" story. But I think they make more of the story's uniqueness than they should have. There are many other cases with similar points, although this one may be more extreme in some ways. Here's a smattering of phenomena that bear some similarities to this case. There are many species (especially in insects, but also in other groups I think) that have have two types of males, one of which mimics a female in some respect. This often happens when males are very territorial because one that looks like a female will be left alone. In a case where two males are distracted by each others' presence, a "sneaker" male that looks like a female can walk over and mate with the female while the other males are duking it out. In some species (many birds come to mind) the juvenile males resemble females in plumage, and are safe from other males who don't see them as a threat until they grow up and start looking like males. Hyena females have a "false phallus" that I won't discuss in more detail here. Many, many insects severely damage each other during mating. Dragonfly males, for example, grab onto the female and fly around with her for extended periods of time, preventing her from mating with any other male. In the process he often pokes large holes in her head. I think some species of dragonflies have females that look like males (or have some other color pattern that makes them less attractive) because again, there is selection pressure to avoid unnecessary copulations. Many male insects have intromittent organs that actually destroy a female's genitals after copulation, so she can't mate with anyone else. Even female fruit flies, which don't suffer any obvious damage from mating, have been shown to live shorter life spans the more times they mate (something in the seminal fluid, probably).


So I don't think many biologists would find this system very surprising overall. Perhaps in their own article the scientists will explain which aspects are indeed unique, and which have parallels in other species. After all, the job of scientists is to identify patterns, and then try to understand the processes underlying them. Nature is an inexplicable tangle of oddities until you begin to sort and classify all your weird examples, and then you discover that what appeared bizarre is really perfectly "natural."

/Mr Lynn