The Oyster’s Garter

Priapulids have nothing on this HIV/AIDS prevention poster (REALLY, REALLY NSFW). This ocean scene is a highly disconcerting combination of gorgeous and Legend of the Overfiend. (Though how could a phallic ocean not include those epically well-endowed barnacles?)

Meanwhile, it’s BOOOOBS INNNN SPAAAAAACE (STILL NSFW) for the hetero lads. The theme for both posters? “Explore. Just Protect Yourself.”

The posters are put out by AIDES, a European HIV/AIDS NGO. What is with those Europeans and the sexy science? I’m never, ever, going to look at a turtle the same way again.

Via Boing Boing

Mieke sent me this lovely photo of Australian nudibranchs a while back. My first thought was, “OMG! Koosh balls of the sea!” My second thought was, “They are TOTALLY doin’ it!” (See the loop of orange eggs in the upper right?)

Nudibranchs are sea slugs - just like land slugs, they are molluscs that have lost their shells. Since they don’t have any hard parts to protect them, they tend to be incredibly poisonous - they are pretty and colorful to advertise DO NOT WANT. Nudibranchs’ chemical defenses are usually stolen from their prey, the toxic compounds or stinging cells serving to protect the nudibranch long after that unfortunate sponge or anemone is but a tasty memory.

Like the mighty banana slug, nudibranchs are simultaneous hermaphrodites and can both fertilize and be fertilized. They can be tender, stroking each other’s tentacles, or debauched, mating in chains (who wants to be in the middle?) or snacking on their partner. (Apparently, unlike their banana slug relatives, nudibranchs do not engage in apophallation. Aren’t you disappointed?)  Sadly, the sexy time comes at quite a high cost - most nudibranchs are semelparous, meaning they die shortly after mating.

With the help of Sea Slug Forum and Nudibranchs of Australia, I think Mieke’s nudibranchs in flagrante delicto are a species of Okenia, possibly Okenia stellata. Want more nudibranchs? National Geographic has stunning photos, videos, and even nudibranch puzzles.

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.

Nature keeps on betraying right-wing conservatives. For example, it’s hard to claim that homosexuality is unnatural when adorable gay penguins are raising a chick together. (I’m not even getting into the question of the natural-ness of chicks with dicks.) Now, the Christian right’s monogamy poster-vole has been revealed as, in the words of the Nature paper, a “randy rodent [that] revels in raunchy romps.”

The prairie vole has long been renowned for its lifelong partnerships. Eric Keroack, the Bush administration’s appointee to oversee federal family planning programs, cited prairie vole research to support his claim that:

Keroack claims that that people who engage in premarital sex experience chronic emotional pain, which lowers their oxytocin levels. This in turn impairs their ability to form healthy relationships down the road. “People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual,” he writes.

It’s a good thing Keroack has since resigned, because his oxytocin levels might have been severely damaged by new research showing that female prairie voles are dirty, dirty cheaters. Paternity tests reveal that the voles are only socially monogamous. Sexually…well, they’re only a role model if you’re polyamorous. While maintaining their primary partnership, female voles have sex with lots of other males.

And to make moral matters worse from Keroack’s point of view, those slutty female voles aren’t even punished. From the Nature News article:

Carter has observed philandering voles in her own lab, and notes that the infidelity did not disrupt pre-existing partnerships. When a female initiates contact with an outside male, for example, the relationship remains strictly sexual. “She mated with him,” says Carter, “and then she attacked him, ran him off and went back to her established partner.”

Clearly, the next target of abstinence-only sex ed programs should be the voles.

Barnacles have the most impressive penises in the sea - a barnacle’s penis can be 8 times longer than the barnacle’s entire body. Barnacles are well-endowed because they’re cemented in place - in order to advance the species, they need to, um, “visit” their neighbors. (That’s also why barnacles are simultaneous hermaphrodites that both give and receive the glorious gift of crustacean life. Separate sexes wouldn’t work, since the only neighbor in reach could be the same sex.)

However, apparently barnacle love is even more amazing than we thought!  Science Daily (via Bug Girl) reports:

Graduate student Christopher Neufeld and Dr. Richard Palmer from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta have shown that barnacles appear to have acquired the capacity to change the size and shape of their penises to closely match local wave conditions.

When wave action is light, a longer (thinner) penis can reach more mates, but at times of higher wave action, a shorter (stouter) penis is more manoeuvrable in flow and therefore can reach more mates.

It’s not the size of the barnacle penis, it’s the motion in the ocean! Clearly, this calls for a viewing of that classic of crustacean pornography, “Barnacles Tell No Lies.”

Take science, add a dash of poor science reporting and a hint of homophobia and get this media coverage of antibiotic resistant MRSA, or flesh-eating bacteria. The source is a study that found gay men in Boston and San Francisco were about 13 times more likely to be infected with antibiotic-resistant MRSA than the general population in the cities.

Antibiotic-resistant MRSA is not sexually transmitted - it is transmitted by skin-to-skin contact (which may or may not be sexual) or by touching contaminated surfaces. So a high prevalence is not necessarily related to sexual practices, but to a population that has a lot of close contact. However, most of the press coverage focused on TEH BUTT SEX!!! For example, Reuter’s lede (via CJR):

A drug-resistant strain of potentially deadly bacteria has moved beyond the borders of U.S. hospitals and is being transmitted among gay men during sex, researchers said on Monday.

But when I looked at the original study, the prevalence of infection in the buttocks, genitals, or perineum was only 25-37%. TEH BUTT SEX was not responsible for a majority of the infections - the skin-to-skin contact (like dancing or touching the same doorhandle) that results from living in highly concentrated gay areas like the Castro was at fault. That’s why outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant MRSA have been found among other people in close proximity, like schools, the military, and sports teams. (I know, the joke is obvious, but they can’t ALL be gay.)

Because everyone who touches other people is theoretically at risk of an antibiotic-resistant MRSA infection, putting the onus on gay sex is problematic. It’s not a Gay Disease. Of course, that didn’t stop the lovely ladies of Concerned Women of America from blaming poor Will and Grace (via Salon):

“Television shows like ‘Will and Grace’ glorify the homosexual lifestyle,” Barber declared, “while our children are taught in schools that homosexuality is a perfectly healthy, alternative sexual ‘orientation.’ ‘Stay out of our bedrooms!’ we’re often commanded by militant ‘gay’ activists. Well, now the dangerous and possibly deadly consequence of what occurs in those bedrooms is spilling over into the general population. It’s not only frightening, it’s infuriating. Citizens, especially parents, need to stand up and say, ‘No More!’”

I hope CWA boycotted the Superbowl, too, since it’s not just the gays we need to fear - it’s football players. Salon goes on to point that in a study on the St. Louis Rams, researchers found that

…infection occurred only among linemen and linebackers, and not among those in backfield positions, probably because of the frequent contact among linemen during practice and games.

That’s right, Concerned Women of America…no infection among those in backfield positions. Now I need to go scrub any not-gay MRSA off my not-gay-though-kinda-mannish hands.

Thanks to Scott for the suggestions and the links!

Not only can unplanned pregnancies lead to poverty and divorce - but you can even lose a limb!! That’s the message of this comic from Planned Parenthood circa 1956. (Also available redrawn with Asian heads, courtesy of Singapore.) Also, beware of getting too hep.

Here’s the whole collection of “Comics with Problems.” Via Pandagon

[Update: For more on abortion as a human right, see Are Women Human?" on Pandagon.]

Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. NARAL is celebrating with Blog for Choice Day. Since I believe that having a choice about whether to be pregnant is a critical human right, here’s my contribution.

One of the hoary old tactics of anti-choice activists is to equate abortion with murder. They claim that killing a fertilized egg, no matter how old, is the same as killing a toddler or an adult. So the argument over abortion has been about when life begins - is it Sperm Magic (the moment an egg is fertilized) or is it “quickening” (when movement can be felt) or is it birth itself?

Since nobody can objectively determine the beginning of life, there can be no compromise. That is, IF anti-choice activists really, truly think abortion is murder. But they don’t.

This truly fantastic chart from Alas, a Blog opened my eyes. It lists actual policies proposed by anti-choicers, and whether it is consistent with abortion=murder…or whether it is consistent with punishing women who have sex.

A majority of graduate students in ecology are female, but the pipeline sure is leaky. Maybe it’s because of Ye Olde Career/Motherhood Issues (can’t dive with a baby), maybe it’s because women burn to nuture non-profits instread of cut academic throats, maybe we are all just delicate blooms perishing away in the burning Science Sun. Or maybe not.

Jarrett Byrnes of i’m a chordata, urochordata has an excellent post on the effect of having a recognizable female name on one’s chances of publication. Jarrett writes:

To test the idea, [a study in Trends in Ecology & Evolution] looked at the journal Behavioral Ecology, that instituted a double blind peer review process in 2001 - so, not only do authors not know who is reviewing their papers, but reviewers don’t know the names of the authors. The relative proportion of female first author papers increased.

Even controlled for the increasing number of female ecologists, this represents a 33% increase in the representation of female authors. Just from going double-blind during the review process. Go read the rest of Jarrett’s post for pretty graphs and more disturbing facts.

This fairly huge bias, unconcious though it may be, is terrifying to a baby scientist of the XX persuasion. The vast majority of journals are not double-blind. When I eventually get published, I will probably use my first and middle initials - and not just because that gives me the rockin’ moniker MC Goldstein.

I absolutely must highlight this post on the Other 95%. It has it all - sea squirts, orgies, biofoam, and a take-home conservation message! Knowing that sea squirts are even more kinky than I imagined (and I have a good imagination) is making my scientific forays into squirt-dom so much more awesome.

For pretty pictures of sexy squirts, check out I’m a chordata, urochordata’s Sea Squirt Sundays.