The Oyster’s Garter

Horrific sexual hijinks are taking place beneath the majestic redwoods of central California! I’m not talking about San Francisco - the Fulton Street Fair looks like a Bible Belt county fair compared to this. No, I speak of the unspeakable sexual habits of the lovely banana slug.

The banana slug, so called for its fetching yellow color with occasional black spots, is the second-largest slug in the world (and the mascot of UC Santa Cruz). For most of its life, it crawls about the Pacific redwood forest in the normal sluggy fashion, munching upon rotting leaves, mushrooms, animal droppings, and other detritus. But if a slug crosses the pheremone-soaked slime trail of a fellow slug, prolonged tantric slug-sex ensues…and ends in a most ghastly fashion.

Before we get to the juicy bits (slimy bits?), you need to know a bit about slug anatomy. Most slugs are simultaneous hermaphrodites and have both a penis and a genital opening, so that when they have sex they both fertilize and are fertilized. (They then both lay eggs somewhere damp and out of the way, and that is it for parental care.) Also, due to the vagaries of evolution, the genitalia and anus of slugs are located on the right side of their heads. This is because slugs are descended from snails with spiraling shells - the snails needed to move their naughty bits down in order to extend outside the shell, so they put them on their head. Even though slugs have since lost their shells, they have retained this feature of snail anatomy. So most gastropods actually poop on their own heads - ain’t nature grand?

So, slug-sex begins with head-waving and gentle biting of the other slug’s genital opening. Once they get to the Big Deed, the slugs both insert their penises into the other’s genital opening (remember, both are on the right side of their head) and go at it for hours and hours. And hours and hours and hours. And then…sometimes…one or both slugs will CHEW OFF THE OTHER’S PENIS. Yep, they rasp with their radula until the penis comes off. Then they slurp down the penis like spaghetti.

I bet your very first reaction was, “Boy, I sure hope there is a video of sexy slug cannibalism!” Of course there is, gentle reader! If you still want more, have some auto-apophallation (isn’t that a great bit of jargon?) - this is a video [warning: big file] of a slug chewing off its own penis.

Do not fear too much for the penis-less slug. While the penis does not grow back, the slug is not condemned to a lonely sexless life. It can still enjoy slug-sex as the receiving party. But perhaps the more educated banana slugs contemplate the theories of Freud and shake their tentacles in rage at the cruel hand of Fate. Or at least the cruel radula of their ex.

This post was inspired by the slugs in flagrante in the above photo, which I met near the Little Sur River this past weekend. (The openings you see are not their genitals, but their pneumatostome, which is how they breathe.) It is unknown if any penis-gnawing ensued, as the slugs were still making the sweet yin-yang of love amidst the flowers when I left.

Poor Oyster’s Garter, languishing away while I slave in the tunicate mines and Eric gallivants off to Tahoe for his annual ski vacation. Soon I will supply you with my take on the Great Marine Invertebrate Wars (Down with molluscs AND echinoderms! Up with urochordates!) along with XXX Adult-Only Red Hot banana slug photos. In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been up to instead of supplying your science-blogging needs:

• I am learning how to grow the golden star tunicate Botryllus schlosseri in the lab. It is quite a fetching creature with lovely orange or blue zooids arranged in a flower shape. It’s also invasive all over the temperate world, so it’s quite handy as a model organism. More on the awesomeness of tunicates later.
• Last Thursday, the debonair Mark Powell of blogfish took me out for a fine Thai dinner. Mango coconut rice, career advice, and science blog gossip…what more could a grad-student blogger desire?
• Over the weekend, I went backpacking near Pico Blanco in Big Sur. Being the nice Jewish girl that I am, I even packed out hamentaschen for a proper backcountry Purim celebration. Even though I’m a die-hard East Coaster, I could get used to this combination of stunning scenery and no mosquitoes. Also, I LOVE BANANA SLUGS!!!! (even though on principle, urochordates are way better than molluscs. but OMG, the big yellow slugs with the adorable little oral tentacles that they waved so cutely…wudda little slug!)

Next on The Oyster’s Garter: sexy banana slug pics and why urochordata is the BEST PHYLA EVAH.

This is an art film about…about…well, zits. And the people who pop them. Watching it, in fact, is just like popping a zit - repellent yet strangely enjoyable.

Via Boing Boing

Don’t have huge wads of cash to donate but wish you did? Tell philanthropy-minded rich folks how to spend their environmental dollars. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (of NPR advertising fame) funded the Keystone Center for Science & Public Policy to create a “listening survey” designed to answer this question:

What are the major challenges to biodiversity conservation over the next 5 to 10 years and beyond and what might be the most significant opportunities for philanthropic impact?

The results will inform the Doris Duke Foundation’s giving. In other words, this survey could have a real impact in how environmental dollars are spent. So click here to tell them what you think!

The survey took me about 15 minutes to complete. There aren’t many questions, but many of them are open-ended. And you get a cookie at the end! (ok, it’s only a nerd-cookie, but you do get to see the results of the survey so far. including write-in comments.)

Via Bug Girl

Best measuring cup ever.

Via Boing Boing

Arthur C. Clarke died today, a lively old geezer at the age of 90. I was never as heavy a reader of Clarke as I was of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov (The Big Three early SciFi writers), but there’s no questioning his influence. His paper on geosynchronous orbit of satellites in 1945 eventually inspired some engineers to actually go out and invent satellites (He said he only clarified already extant ideas) so we can maybe thank him for our modern telecom world. His fiction gave Gene Roddenberry the courage to create Star Trek, which in turn lead to Star Wars, and, eventually, Firefly.

I do rather hope this “Dying in Threes” rule doesn’t stay in genres, because now we’ve lost Gary Gygax and Clarke in relatively quick succession. Bradbury may want to go get a medical checkup.

In the meantime, a couple of choice quotes from the New York Times obituary, which I thought the best.

But as a science fiction writer, he couldn’t resist drawing up timelines for what he called “possible futures.” Far from displaying uncanny prescience, these conjectures mainly demonstrated his lifelong, and often disappointed, optimism about the peaceful uses of technology — from his calculation in 1945 that atomic-fueled rockets could be no more than 20 years away to his conviction in 1999 that “clean, safe power” from “cold fusion” would be commercially available in the first years of the new millennium.

Mr. Clarke reveled in his fame. One whole room in his house — which he referred to as the Ego Chamber — was filled with photos and other memorabilia of his career, including pictures of him with Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.

Mr. Clarke’s standard answer when journalists asked him outright if he was gay was, “No, merely mildly cheerful.”

Greetings from Monterey, former land of the mighty sardine, current land of Stanford’s  Hopkins Marine Station. Hopkins is my home for the next two weeks as I find out how fast I can learn tunicate mariculture and population genetics. (I really hope the answer is “in two weeks, of course!” But I doubt it.) Updates might be somewhat spotty since I fear my brain will not have room for anything unless it is related to tunicates. However, I still need to eat (particularly squid tacos) and would love to meet up with any readers in the area. Anyone from MBARI out there?

Who needs a bucket when you’ve got Michael Jackson and more rhythm than the entire Goldstein family? (Via Zooillogix)

To get to the Getty Center in Los Angeles, you park at the bottom of a hill in the Santa Monica Mountains, and then take a light rail train up the hill. The views on the way up are pretty spectacular, but descending the view is mostly of the highway. when I visited, lo these many years ago, I actually studied the highway a bit on the way own. I saw a white station wagon in the left lane driving a bit slow for the fast lane. The car behind it (an SUV, I think) caught up to the station wagon and hit the brakes, dropping speed. The next car dropped speed even slower, and the fourth car actually came to a halt. By then the front car had pulled ahead off the front of the line, but the bottle neck was started. One by one cars approached the bottle neck and hit the brakes and then waited a moment for the front car to pull off.

As it happened, I was visiting two friends that day (Hi Chris and Kirsten!), one of whom was then a fledgling economist and system modeler (now he’s a full grown economist). The reason for traffic jams, he argued, was in speed differentials. If everyone drove precisely the same speed, and there were no accidents, there would be no (or at least far fewer) traffic jams. Well, some Japanese scientists have proved him right. the video below gives a proper explanation of the experiment, but basically they had a group of cars drive in a circle at exactly the same speed. But natural variations in driver ability or course construction caused some car to drive slightly slower than another. The car behind it caught up and had to drive slower, and the chain went back for a couple of cars. Then, as the front car accelerated off the end, the jam actually moved backward along the circle like a shockwave, at a speed of about 20 kph. This is the observed speed a jammed section of traffic will move down the highway.

So, one way to solve problems of jam caused by too many cars on the highway would be robot controlled cars. The robots could, hopefully, be counted on to drive at a precises speed more reliably than humans, plus, since they would have faster reactions, they could probably drive in closer proximity, all of which would result in substantially increased capacity for our highways. If I can’t have flying cars, I at least want robot driven cars, OK?

I’ve written about my love of urban wildlife before, but this French weed is taking it to a whole new level. In the latest edition of PNAS, French scientists report that a humble sidewalk week has actually changed its reproductive strategy in just a few generations in order thrive amidst the vast concrete plains.

Crepis sancta is a weed with pretty yellow flowers that grows in little patches along roadsides and sidewalks. It has two types of seed: a fluffy one that can float far away, and a heavy one that stays right next to mommy. In the wild, Crepis would want to split its reproductive effort in order to both colonize new patches with the fluffy windblown seeds and to maintains its population with the heavy falling seeds.

But, of course, the wild has soil every which way, and the city does not. Fluffy seeds that land on concrete are dead. In fact, the French scientists found that fluffy seeds in the city have success rates 50% lower than fluffy seeds in the wild.

What’s a savvy urban plant to do? Make more heavy seeds, of course. Urban Crepis do indeed have significantly more heavy seeds than rural Crepis - and it’s managed to evolve this change in only 5-12 generations. In evolutionary time, that’s a New York minute. Next thing you know, Crepis will be ordering takeout and dancing till the sun comes up.

(Note that it’s my very first time officially Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research! Go to Research Blogging for more researchy goodness.)

Cheptou, P., Carrue, O., Rouifed, S., Cantarel, A. (2008). Rapid evolution of seed dispersal in an urban environment in the weed Crepis sancta. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(10), 3796-3799. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0708446105