Though I’m thrilled that my ode to squid sex appeared in Slate, I only brought the funny to existing research. Since the format at Slate does not allow for citations, here they are.
The videos and the excellent sneaker male facts were from Dr. Lou Zeidberg’s research up at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, CA. He’s a postdoc in the Gilly lab, and an expert on both market squid and the dread Humboldt squid. And he was really, really nice about a last minute Friday-night email from me saying “Um, I kinda linked to your lab webpage without thinking and um, your traffic might go up a lot, and um, you don’t get charged for bandwidth, right?”
The other scientific source of squidly passions was SIO’s own Dr. John McGowan. Dr. McGowan is best known for his Pacific plankton expertise, and until I wrote this piece I had no idea he was tooling around La Jolla Canyon on primitive SCUBA equipment in the 50s. Awesome.
Also thanks to fellow student and resident squid fiend Mike Navarro for his help in finding squid sex resources.
Sources:
McGowan, J.A. 1954. Observation on the sexual behaviour and spawning of the squid Loligo opalescens at La Jolla, California. Californian Fish and Game 40: 47-54.
Zeidberg, Louis D. (2008). First observations of sneaker mating in the California market squid Doryteuthis opalescens (Cephalopoda: Myopsida) J. Mar. Biol. Assoc. 2 Biodiversity Records 5998.
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I have to believe that Dr. Zoidberg contributed something to this research too and should be credited somehow.
Drat! I so wanted to mention Dr. Zoidberg first and now I lost my chance. Like they say . . .
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Loved the article! It’s always great to see humor still exists in academia!
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Great, fun and insightful writing! better than most articles on ‘The Best American Science Writing 2008′ (ed. Sylvia Nassar). More!