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In the world of Giant Australian cuttlefish, males outnumber females four to one. On average, three out of every four males don’t get to mate.
how does a smaller sized male stand a chance of fighting the larger ones thus finding a mate?
how do these little guys get around the hordes of much larger male cuttlefish to get to the females?
Runt male cuttlefish get past larger males they couldn’t possibly defeat in a fight by disguising themselves as females.
Their skin camouflages into the mottled skin patterning typical of females, and they hide their fourth pair of tentacles, a pair the females don’t possess. Then they shape the remaining tentacles in an egg laying posture. When well prepared they simply walk past their larger competition without a challenge
It’s so convincing that in a study of this behavior, these males successfully fertilized female cuttlefish sixty percent of the time. The typical success rate for the larger and undisguised males is about half that.
blind mutation is cunning indeed! 😉
feivel: 🙂 Why dont you star a Niflaos Haboreh/National Geographics thread?
We should start a convention discussing the crisis that is 75% of these male cuttlefish never having kiddie fish. We should encourage the females to court older cuttlefish, create an age-gap if you will. So that more male cuttlefish will produce offspring.
Or maybe we should encourage girl and boys who have shidduch problems to do as the cuttle fish and go on dates in costumes! I would love to see something like that. The dates would laugh so hard that they would be sure to enjoy themselves. This way there willl be second dates which might lead to ….something else. 🙂
See what good things you can learn from the animal world? Proud Tatty, are you starting a shiduch group for the fish?
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